


Untold

by themayqueen



Category: Hanson (Band)
Genre: Alcohol, Babies, Car Accidents, Depression, Developing Relationship, Diary/Journal, Engagement, F/M, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Letters, Missing Persons, On-Again/Off-Again Relationship, Past Abuse, Past Relationship(s), Police, Secrets, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Undecided Relationship(s), Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-18
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-08-29 12:17:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 20
Words: 35,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8489350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themayqueen/pseuds/themayqueen
Summary: After his fiancee’s death, Taylor vowed never to return to Tulsa again. When he finds himself pulled back, he discovers that he’s left more behind that he thought. He’s determined to pick up the pieces and build some sort of normal life and family, and unravel all the lies that he and everyone else have been telling.





	1. The Return

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for [The Spark Inside](http://spark.placetohide.net) in Spring 2011, but I did not quite reach the deadline. Here are the prompts I was supposed to incorporate, many of which I did manage to use eventually:
> 
>  
> 
> _The event that gets the story rolling: The story starts when your character returns to a town he/she never thought they'd go back to_  
>  A secondary conflict: Another character is an ex of your best friend, who just moved into the building next door  
> One setting: Starbucks  
> Theme: Rescue - this plot involves the Protagonist searching for someone or something  
> One challenge: an important letter is lost  
> One random plot point/twist: finds out she's pregnant  
> One cardinal character trait: Outspoken  
> One character weakness: trusts too easily  
> Character's most prized possession: a journal  
> One every day character problem: Crabbiness  
> One character fear: Losing his hair  
> One character quirk: Distance runner  
> One character problem: Character has an obsession with being in control  
> One non-Hanson song: Musiq Soulchild - Who Knows  
> Dialogue: Character 1: Do you know what I'm talking about?  
> Character 2: Of course I don't know what you're talking about. I never understand what the hell is coming out of your mouth.

Taylor didn't read the letter. It sat unopened on the table in his apartment's entryway for days, taunting him. He had run away from Tulsa months ago and cut all ties, yet that letter was a tiny piece of his old life bleeding over into his new. For almost two weeks he walked by Zac's letter every day, at least twice, and did not even think of ripping through the thin layers of paper containing it. When the phone call from his mother came, he did not answer that either. He didn't need to hear her say it.

It was time to go back. Seven months of running, but it was time to go back.

He hadn't bothered to find a job yet or make any friends in Chicago, so he had no ties to sever before packing his bags and going back. Taylor threw a haphazard array of his belongings into a few bags and bought the cheapest plane tickets he could find. With some clothes, a guitar and the letter, still unread, tucked safely into the pocket of his laptop case, he made his way back to Tulsa.

The plane ride was as uneventful as he could have hoped for. He downed a few expensive drinks just because he could and tried to find the inspiration to write in his journal. He hadn't touched it in a year, although he carried it with him at all times. Reading through the old entries was like peeling open old wounds, but as he sipped at the drinks, he couldn't resist the urge to flip through page after page of song lyrics and mundane details of his days. He had tried not to think about Charlotte since he left, but as the plane brought him closer and closer to his old home, the memories came flooding back. 

When the plane landed, he caught a cab back to his old house. The address fell off his tongue with such ease that it seemed he'd never left at all. He leaned his head against the window of the cab and watched with only mild interest as the streets of his hometown passed by. Nothing had changed, or so it seemed. But Taylor knew that wasn't true. It wasn't the same town without Charlotte. He'd have to sell the house if he was going to stay, he decided. He couldn't stay in the same place they'd tried to make home when she was no longer there.

The cab deposited him in front of the little house and he had to take a long, deep breath before finding the energy to actually cross the threshold. He realized after a while that he was only being silly, standing pointlessly in the driveway. With some effort, he hoisted all of his bags up and forced himself up the driveway and through the front door. He'd never taken the key off his keychain, for stupid sentimental reasons. 

Inside, it was dark and cold. Flipping the light switch on-–Taylor hadn't ever convinced himself to have the utilities turned off for some stupid reason-–he saw that nothing had really changed, save for the heavy layer of dust coating every surface. The fish tank Charlotte had insisted on for their living room now sat empty and ridiculous looking. Looking out the window, he saw a car parked in front of the house next door. That had been empty when he and Charlotte moved in, but Taylor didn't care to who the new neighbor was. He truly hoped this was only a temporary visit, not long enough to bother with introductions and acquaintances.

He shuffled to the bedroom and tossed his bags down on the bare mattress. He'd have to dig through the closets he'd never truly emptied out to see if he could find sheets and blankets, or else just crash on the couch. Taylor had a feeling the couch was more likely. 

The kitchen cabinets and refrigerator were empty, of course. Taylor realized he was suddenly starving, and the only appropriate way to fix it seemed a trip to the Starbucks down the block. If anything could make him feel more at home again, it would be Starbucks. 

The streets of Tulsa were not as busy as Chicago, and Taylor didn't like that. He knew he was much more likely to run into someone he knew, and he wasn't prepared for that. The looks of pity and the half-hearted kind words were more than he could bear. Surely after a year, people would leave him alone and let him go back to living, but it didn't seem likely. He pulled his hat down low as he walked into Starbucks and crossed his fingers that no one would recognize him.

The coffee shop was busy, but not so busy that Taylor felt uncomfortable walking around. He got his drink and an oversized pastry quickly and took a seat at one of several empty tables. Someone had left a newspaper scattered across the table's surface, but he didn't think they were coming back for it; there were no other signs that someone was still occupying the table. He started to shove the crumpled papers aside, but a headline on the front page caught his eye.

**YOUNGEST HANSON BROTHER GOES MISSING  
Zac Hanson, 24, last seen three nights ago in Tulsa**

Taylor read the headline three times before he was able to even process the words. The short article, accompanied by an old professional photo of the band, explained how Zac had evidently driven off from his apartment just days before without leaving a note or taking his cell phone. The police gave only a vague statement asking for clues and suggesting they had no clue about Zac's motive or whereabouts. From there, the article turned to rehashing the story of how the band had gone on indefinite hiatus following the death of Taylor's fiancée. He wadded the paper up and tossed it across the table at that point, not needing to read the sordid summary of the hell he'd lived in for the last year.

His hand shook as he tried to gulp down his meal, but he found himself unable to stomach it. The latte had gone cold, and he forced it down in huge gulps, but he couldn't get any further than lifting the danish to his mouth and quickly lowering it right back to the table. 

He tossed the unfinished meal in the garbage and hurried out onto the street, pulling out his cell phone and dial his parents’ number. It was a Sunday afternoon; he was certain that under any other circumstances, they would be home. He hurried down the street back to his house as he waited for someone to answer his call. Finally, he heard a small click on the line.

"Hello? Taylor dear?" His mother sounded as though she'd been crying.

"Yeah, it's me..." Taylor trailed off, his mind racing with a million questions he wanted to ask. "I, umm, sorry I didn't answer your call the other day. But I'm back in Tulsa now and...well, I just heard the news."

"Oh, honey," she said, with a sniffle. "It's all right. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Mom. I'm on my way home now," Taylor found himself tearing up a bit at how easily the _home_ came tumbling out, even though he didn't think he would ever have called Tulsa that again.

"Oh, good. The police have finally left. Hurry on over and I promise we'll fill you in, okay? Please be careful."

Taylor nodded, even though he knew she couldn't see it. "Okay. I'll be there soon."

With another promise to be safe, Taylor said goodbye. The walk back to his house passed quickly and he wasted no more time opening the garage door and getting in the brand new car he'd left there. Although his parents lived on the outskirts of town in a secluded subdivision and his own house was closer to downtown, the drive didn't take very long. Still, every minute that passed gave Taylor time to think of all the worst possibilities about what might have happened to his brother. 

When he finally arrived at their house, he could see even from the front gates that the driveway was full of cars. He recognized Isaac and his wife Mollie's SUV, as well as their younger sister Jessica's new car, which she had just bought before Taylor left. It wasn't unusual for their parents' house to be so full of people, but he knew that this day was different.

As soon as he stepped out of his car and onto the driveway, he saw his mother running down the front steps to meet him. He scooped her up into a tight hug and could feel her tears soaking through his shirt.

"You should have told us you were coming," she said, her voice muffled against Taylor's chest.

"I knew something was wrong when you called, so I just hurried back here as fast as I could."

Diana pulled back from the hug and nodded. "Well, come on inside and we'll tell you what we know so far. Everyone's here, of course. So many people have been coming and going, bringing all kinds of food like someone... well, just come on in."

Taylor followed his mother inside and into the kitchen, where Isaac and Mollie sat sipping coffee. The table and every available inch of counter top were covered, just as she had said, with all sorts of food. A tray of cold cuts was open on the table but no one seemed to be eating any of it. Taylor poured himself a cup of coffee and plopped down in one of the empty chairs, waiting for someone to start talking and help him make some sense of what had happened.

"Have you talked to Zac lately?" Isaac finally asked.

"No," Taylor said, thinking of the letter he hadn't even opened.

"Yeah, I didn't figure you had."

Taylor raised an eyebrow. "What's that supposed to mean?" 

Isaac opened his mouth to speak, but stopped when Mollie reached her hand out and grasped his arm. Taylor shook his head. He knew they were all mad at him for leaving, but now didn't really seem like the appropriate time to bring that argument up again.

Diana sat down in the remaining empty chair and cleared her throat. "Zac had been acting weird for a while now, but I don't think any of us could have known he was going to just... disappear. The police are considering every possibility, but I think he did it on purpose. He's a grown boy; he could take care of himself."

"And we're sure he's really missing and didn't just do something stupid like go away for the weekend and forget to call?" Taylor asked. He was grasping at straws, he knew, but nothing made sense.

"Well, we're keeping things as quiet as we can for now, but the police think there's something suspicious going on," Diana replied.

"Plus, the last place anyone saw him was a bar," Isaac added. "So he was drunk and he probably did something stupid, all right. But if he had an accident, we don't know."

Taylor's stomach turned and he grasped at the table to keep his balance. Images of Charlotte's car wreck flashed through his mind, although her car was replaced with Zac's truck and her body with Zac's. He couldn't lose someone else that way. But surely, if that had happened, the police would know by now. He had to hope Zac hadn't met the same fate.

"I think... I think I'm gonna go home. Get settled back in," Taylor managed to mumble.

"Sure, honey. Take some food; we've got more than we need," Diana said, standing up and grabbing a bag to fill with provisions for Taylor to take with him.

Taylor nodded. "Okay. I'll stop back by tomorrow and check in?"

"Of course," Diana said, pilling his arms full of Tupperware containers and bags of chips. "I'm sure the police will want to talk to you, just in case you know anything."

"Right." Taylor sighed. He was not looking forward to another trip to the police station. It was just all too familiar and opened up too many still-fresh wounds.

Taylor said his goodbyes, pilled the food into his backseat and drove home. The thought that he could wreck his own car and end everything did cross his mind, but that was nothing new. He'd found himself plagued by that thought every time he drove anywhere for the past year. He would imagine driving off the side of a bridge, swerving into a tree or running a red light. Taylor didn't think he would actually do it, but just to be on the safe side, he hadn't taken the car to Chicago. He decided that after this drive, it would go back in his garage again for good.

Even though he had been gone for months, the drive home seemed to just happen, Taylor's body going through the motions on pure muscle memory without his mind having to lift a single cell to help the drive along. It took even less time than he remembered, and then he was back in the his garage, locking up the car and fiddling for the house key he'd never bothered to remove from his key ring. 

He shoved all the food his mother had foisted on him in the empty pantry and refrigerator shelves. It didn't make the kitchen feel any more like home. With a sigh, he pulled a dusty bottle of some expensive whiskey from a cabinet and didn't bother searching for a glass that he'd probably want to wash first anyway. Instead, he unscrewed the bottle top and drank straight from it, welcoming the way it burned all the way down his throat. 

Once Taylor's insides felt warm and numb, he set the bottle back on the counter, not even caring to put the lid back on. He stumbled out of the kitchen and into the living room. It looked just as it had earlier that day when he had walked in with his suitcases. Pictures of he and Charlotte still sat in frames along the fireplace mantle, and he couldn't resist stomping over and running his hand along the length of it, sending the frames crashing to the floor. They tumbled to the floor, landing mostly unharmed on the plush carpet. It didn't satisfy Taylor's anger.

He hurried up the stairs to his bedroom, deciding to tear through whatever was left of Charlotte's possessions. He didn't want to destroy them, but he needed something, anything, to vent his frustration. Temporarily forgetting about his suitcase, he stumbled over it and let out a loud curse. All his anger became redirected at it, and he tore through the bag, sending his own clothes flying around the room. Taylor even kicked his guitar case across the room, at the moment not caring if he damaged it. If Zac was... well, Taylor thought, he knew then that he would never play again. It didn't matter if he destroyed every instrument he owned, not if Zac was dead.

Merely thinking about the possibility that Zac could truly be dead was enough to sober him up. He collapsed onto the bed, utterly exhausted, past the point of even crying. He had thought, when Charlotte died, that his life could get no worse. He was wrong.


	2. Shiloh

The next morning, Taylor was jarred awake by the sound of a phone ringing. It sounded unfamiliar, and it took him a moment to realize why. As he struggled to wake and remember where the phone was in this room, the previous day came flooding back to him and his stomach turned at the recollection of what might have happened to his brother.

He pulled the phone from its stand on the dresser. "Hello?" 

"Taylor, honey?" Diana said. "How are you this morning?"

"I've been better," he replied honestly.

"Of course. I think we all have. Listen, the police called and said they'd like you to come by and answer a few questions, whenever you have the time today."

Taylor cleared his throat. He'd been afraid of this. "Okay. I can do that, I think."

"I know it won't be easy, and you probably don't have anything to tell them anyway. Just do what you can, okay?" Diana said, her voice full of sympathy, almost to the point of pity.

"I'll try," Taylor replied honestly, then said his goodbyes.

He took his sweet time showering and getting dressed, knowing that every single step brought him closer to the police station. He'd spent far too much time there the previous year, when the police just couldn't accept suicide as an answer. They'd never explicitly said they suspected Taylor of any wrong-doing, but he could see it in their eyes every time he had occasion to speak to one of the detectives. Nothing about this latest trip to the police station excited him, but he knew he had to do it.

After several hours of procrastinating, Taylor finally found himself at the police station, steeling his nerves to walk through the door and face his fears. Trying to hide the fact that he was trembling, Taylor walked up to the front desk and cleared his throat to get the officer's attention.

"Excuse me?" Taylor started. "I'm, umm, Taylor Hanson. I was told the police wanted to speak to me about... my brother."

"Just a moment," the officer replied, then picked up the phone on her desk and pressed a button. "He's here, do you want me to send him in?"

Taylor shuffled his feet.

Replacing the phone, she motioned down a short hallway. "Just go on down there, there's a little room where Detective Davies will meet with you."

Taylor recognized the name. One of the same detectives who had spoken to him following Charlotte's death. He was at least one of the nicer ones, but it didn't help the nervous feeling in Taylor's stomach as he shuffled down the hallway. He remembered the waiting room well. It wasn't like being locked up and interrogated, but it wasn't exactly friendly either. Just a small table, water cooler and a few metal chairs. Davies was already standing at the water cooler filling a cup when Taylor walked in.

"Mr. Hanson. Glad you could make it down here today," Davies said, holding out the Styrofoam cup.

Taylor accepted the water and took a small sip, waiting for the detective to start.

"Have a seat," he said, and pulled two of them over, side by side. "I don't think this will take too long, we just want to make sure there's nothing else you can tell us that your parents haven't."

"I really don't think I can help very much," Taylor said.

"That's all right, any little bit will do. Now, when was the last time you saw or spoke to your brother Zachary?"

Taylor wanted to correct him. Zac, not Zachary. But he didn't. "Umm, it's been a few months. He called me at Christmas, but I haven't seen him since I moved to Chicago."

"And you came back because he was missing?"

"No, I hadn't heard that yet," Taylor replied. "I don't really watch the news anymore, and I didn't answer the phone when they called to tell me. I just had a feeling something was wrong."

"Any particular reason?" the detective asked, one eyebrow raised.

"There was a letter from Zac. A couple weeks ago. I didn't open it, though," Taylor briefly considered not explaining the rest, but he knew he should. "We weren't exactly on good terms when I left. I think he only called at Christmas because Mom told him to."

Davies began scribbling down a few notes at this and Taylor instantly regretted telling him the truth. "Why weren't you on good terms?"

"Things just got strained. Charlotte... he was really close to her best friend too, and it just made things weird between us all. I think Shiloh blamed me and Zac took her side."

The detective nodded. "Do you still have the letter?"

Taylor remembered packing it in his laptop case. "Yeah. It's at my house."

"It may help us figure out whether he left on his own or if there was some foul play involved. Of course, if he left on his own, there truly isn't much more we can do."

Taylor nodded. "I'll bring it in as soon as I can."

"That would be greatly appreciated," detective Davies said, standing up and closing his notebook. "And if you remember anything else that you think might help us determine Zac's state of mind or anything else..."

"I'll be right in, I know," Taylor said, then regretted cutting the detective off.

"Of course," he replied, his tone softening a little. "We're terribly sorry to put you and your family through this again."

Taylor nodded, not sure what else to say. That seemed to be enough, as the detective gave him a curt handshake and left Taylor alone to collect himself. He finished the cup of water, and took his trembling footsteps back out of the building. 

On the drive home, he contemplated the letter. He was partially angry with himself for telling the detective about it. If it contained something that incriminated him, though he didn't see how it could, then he'd just damned himself again. On the other hand, if he had just read the damn thing, maybe it would have prevented Zac's leaving in the first place. Maybe, somehow, that letter could have offered him a chance to atone for all the things he thought he'd done to drive Charlotte to the brink.

He had to read the letter. He absolutely had to. And whatever it said, he had damned himself into showing it the police. He could only hope it helped.

He pulled into the driveway of his house, but could not find the energy or will to walk in the door. He sat and stared at the garage door, not even opening it to pull his car in. After several minutes, he collapsed against the steering wheel, banging his head against it repeatedly.

A knock at the car's window made him jump and he looked up to see a familiar face staring down at him. He rolled the window down in disbelief.

"Shiloh?"

She nodded, as he knew she would. Of course it was her, but Taylor had no idea why Charlotte's best friend was standing in his driveway.

"I didn't know you were back."

Taylor nodded, finding himself unable to say anything. He wondered if he should tell her about Zac. Judging by the tearstains and smudged makeup, and the fact that she looked like she might have been wearing the same oversized sweatshirt for a few days, he figured she already knew.

"So, I guess we're neighbors now," she said tersely, nodding toward the apartment building next door. Taylor realized it must have been her car he saw parked there earlier. "I thought you had sold this place."

"No, I couldn't," he replied, finally opening his car door and stepping out. "I just couldn't. Too many memories to live here, but too many to let it go..."

He trailed off as he looked down at Shiloh's body. She looked different somehow, though he wasn't quite sure what it was that had changed. She looked defeated and deflated, yet the sweatshirt seemed distinctly tighter across her chest and stomach. Taylor realized he was staring.

"Stop gaping, Taylor. Go on and ask, even though you already know the answer."

"Are you..."

"Pregnant? Of course I am. Did you think I just got fat while you were gone?" Shiloh snapped.

"No, I just wasn't..." Taylor didn't know how to finish that statement. '"Who's the father? Zac?"

"No."

There was a defensiveness to her statement. It was a denial, but it was an answer, too. Taylor knew what it meant, although he wanted to deny it. Shaking his head, he backed away from her and toward the door to his house.

"You can't ignore me forever!" Shiloh called out. "You'll have to get used to seeing me, you know. I live next door. Can you live with that, Taylor? Or will you just run off to Chicago again and pretend this didn't happen?"

Taylor spun around. "Shut up. Just shut up."

"So you are going to deny it?"

"No," Taylor shook his head. "But I'm damn sure not going to yell about it on the lawn while my brother's missing and I'll probably be the first suspect, if history feels like repeating itself. So if you're determined to talk about this, come inside."

Taylor turned his back to Shiloh and walked into the house, not even looking to see if Shiloh had followed him. He headed straight for the kitchen and poured himself a drink from the bottle he'd left out the night before. It was still early in the day, but it seemed the perfect time to start drinking. He grabbed a sandwich from one of the trays in the refrigerator, just so he'd feel a little more responsible about his drinking habits and perhaps not be violently ill from drinking on an empty stomach. When he turned back around, Shiloh had pulled up a seat at the kitchen table.

Taylor sat down next to her and for a while, they only stared at each other. He had always thought Shiloh was odd; her nickname "Shy" had always struck him as highly funny, given how little it suited her. She was just so loud and brash compared to Charlotte, and he never really understood their friendship, or the friendship-slash-relationship she'd had with Zac. He couldn't deny that she had a certain charm, though, and she was certainly pretty. Yet he could not for the life of him remember what she was claiming they had done. Still, he'd spent so much of the first months after Charlotte's death in a fog; it was possible, he supposed, that he just had no memory of it.

"Did you invite me in just to stare or what?"

Taylor sighed. "Do you want a sandwich or anything? I don't have much, just some stuff Mom gave me when I went over to hear the news about..."

"About Zac," she finished for him.

"Yeah," Taylor said with a small nod. "Do you have any idea... had you talked to him?"

"No. We haven't talked for months... I mean, he could do the math, you know? I tried to lie to him, but he figured out soon enough that he wasn't the one to blame."

"Blame?" Taylor repeated, not quite sure he followed.

"For this!" she said, pointing to her stomach. "You think I wanted this? I mean, I was willing to try to have a normal life with Zac, but he wasn't exactly having it. Can't say that I blame him for that. I didn't tell him it was yours though, so don't worry about that."

"Did you tell the cops? I think they might find that slightly relevant, given the situation. And for that matter, why the hell didn't you tell me?" Taylor asked.

"You ran off!" Shiloh screeched, jumping out of her chair and leaning over the table. "You ran off and I figured you wanted nothing to do with me, and definitely not this kid. For once in my life, I decided to keep my mouth shut about something. Figured I had a better shot at a normal life if I kept it a secret."

"But when did we...? Shiloh, I'm sorry, but I don't remember," Taylor admitted.

Her shoulders slumped. "And that's another reason why I didn't tell you. You were drunk. I was drunk. It took me a long time to convince myself I hadn't imagined it and I didn't know if you would even believe me."

"When?"

"Seven months ago. Just a few days before you left. I guess you had already planned it all out even before..." she trailed off. "Can I use your bathroom? I'm not feeling very well."

Taylor nodded. "Third door on the right."

As he watched her walk out of the room, he contemplated what she'd said. It made a kind of logic, Taylor had to admit. If he was drunk, then maybe he had erased the memory of it entirely. He had to find Zac's letter now, and read it. What if Zac had figured it all out? What if Zac was mad at him? His worries about the letter somehow implicating him seemed to be coming true.

Shiloh was gone for several minutes, and Taylor finally decided to go check on her. He rapped gently on the bathroom door and called out her name.

"Shiloh? Are you all right?"

"I'm okay," she said softly. "Just a minute."

Taylor stepped back from the door to wait. "Okay. Just checking."

A few seconds later, the door slid open and Shiloh stepped out, looking very pale. She kept her eyes down as she stood against the opposite wall, silently imploring Taylor to speak.

"I'm really sorry I ran off, Shy," Taylor said. "I had no idea. If I had... well, I'm back here now. I knew there was a reason for me to come back. I've gotta make this right, with you and with Zac."

"But what if he's dead, Tay? What if he killed himself because of me... or because of us..." 

Taylor flung himself forward and pulled her into a tight hug. "He can't be. I won't believe it. We've had too much taken from us. It's not gonna happen again."

Even as he spoke the words, he didn't truly believe them. The confidence in his voice was entirely fake, but he had to force himself to say it so that maybe he could begin to believe.


	3. Memories

After Shiloh left, Taylor found himself stumbling around his house in a daze. He was in a kind of shock, trying to make sense of everything that had happened in just twenty four hours. It was useless, though; there was no sense to be made of it. Walking aimlessly around the house wasn't helping, either. He needed something real to do to distract his mind.

He decided to go for a run.

Taylor had taken up running when his family moved onto their huge plot of land just outside town, with tons of flat land for him to explore. The little neighborhood he lived in now was perfect for a long run, too – it was something he had missed during his stay in Chicago, living in an apartment on a crowded street.

With his mind made up to spend the rest of the afternoon running, Taylor changed into the first pair of sweatpants he could dig out of the mess in his bedroom floor and set off down the street. He had no particular plan for where he was going, he only knew that it would help, somehow, to get outside and let his feet guide him.

He pulled his iPod out of his pocket and turned it to shuffle. It was just a little background noise to help dull his senses; he didn't really care what songs he heard. After some time, a new song came on that hit him like a punch in the gut. Suddenly, memories came flooding back. He wanted to increase his speed and outrun them but he knew he couldn't. Still, he ran on as the memories he thought he'd lost played out in his mind like a scene from a movie.

 

_"I miss her so much, Shy," Taylor slurred, leaning his head against her shoulder. "Why'd she have to leave me?"_

_"Us. She left all of us," Shiloh corrected him, shrugging his head off and scooting away from him._

_"Yeah, but she was my-–"_

_"And my best friend. Don't think this hurts you any less than it hurts me."_

_Taylor saw the tears welling up in Shiloh's eyes and he realized, despite his drunken state, that she was right. Charlotte had left them all, leaving him and Shiloh with a bond like no other. They were tied together by her death, tied together by their pain._

_"I'm sorry, Shy," Taylor said, sniffling. This time she did not shrug away his touch, as he wrapped his arms around her and let out a sob. He felt her trembling against him and knew she was crying too, but silently._

_Once the worst of the sobs had left his body, Taylor pulled back and looked down at Shiloh. She was beautiful, in her own way. He could see perfectly why Zac had fallen for her so long ago, and why he had been so afraid to tell her. Without thinking of the consequences, only thinking how maybe he knew her better, understood her better than anyone else, Taylor pressed his lips to her cheek. It was only meant to be a gesture of reassurance, but she turned her head and pressed her lips fully against his. He found himself powerless to resist._

_The kisses deepened and soon they were tossing aside clothing and exploring each other's flesh. He needed to know her, all of her, and it seemed she felt the same. She didn't object when he lowered her onto her back and removed the last piece of clothing separating their bodies. They moved together on the bed slowly, tentatively, making sure to savor each moment. Taylor only wanted to know her more, wanted to explore this last connection left to Charlotte..._

 

The memory was still hazy; he remembered the important part but now how or why they'd ended up in her bedroom in the first place. He was certain, though, that his drunken recollection was real. Shiloh was right. The baby must be his.

Taylor felt his legs start to give out from under him and he slowed down until the world seemed to stop spinning. He looked around and realized he'd let his feet carry him all the way to Isaac's house without even realizing it. Isaac and Mollie were in the driveway, unloading bags of groceries from their car. Isaac had their son Patrick by his hand and Taylor thought that for all the world it looked like a normal picture of a normal family, but he knew it was anything but. Everyone in their family was just going through the motions, just as they had when Charlotte died. And probably as they had been for the entire year since then. He pulled his earbuds out just as Isaac turned around to see him.

"Taylor," he called out. "What are you doing?"

"Just went for a run. You know how I am."

Isaac nodded, then leaned down and whispered something to the little boy. Patrick ran off toward the porch. Mollie followed behind him, taking heaping armfuls of the groceries with her and giving Isaac a pointed look.

Taylor took the hint and walked up the driveway, wiping sweat from his brow.

"Have a good run?" Isaac asked, clearly just making small talk.

Taylor nodded, waiting for Isaac to get around to the questions he really wanted to ask.

"Mom said you talked to the police today?"

And there it was. A statement, but a question at the same time, the way Isaac liked to do. 

"Yeah, I did," Taylor said. "Not like I really had much to tell them, though."

"Well I guess you wouldn't, since you've been acting like none of us back here even exist," Isaac said. His voice was even but Taylor could still hear the anger hidden by the calmness.

"That's not true," Taylor said, but he could see Isaac's point. He wanted to dispute it, but how could he? He had run off and ignored their calls and letters.

Isaac furrowed his brow, looking as thought he were contemplating several different retorts. Finally, he spoke, "Look, all I know is that you and Zac used to be inseparable. Then you ran off and none of us could talk to him. God knows he never talked to me, ever. And I can't help feeling like somehow you've got something to do with why he's gone."

There was the accusation laid bare. Taylor could feel the weight of Zac's disappearance on his shoulders already, and it only pressed down further now that he knew it wasn't only in his head. Somehow, some way, he was to blame for it and he couldn't deny that. 

"Maybe you're right," Taylor admitted, then let slip a lie that came too easily, "But I don't know how. Maybe he's mad at me for something, I don't know, but I didn't force him to do this."

Isaac brushed a hand through his hair, a nervous habit that Taylor knew was only partially to do with worry over the current situation. He could see the hair beginning to thin around Isaac's temples, even more than he remembered. The past year had aged all of them. Isaac turned his head toward the house and Taylor could see Mollie standing just behind the screen door, her arms folded.

"I should go," Taylor said, before Isaac had the chance to tell him.

For just a moment, Isaac's face softened and he said, "Just don't you leave us too, okay? Run off back to Chicago if you want and hide from your problems, but don't do what Zac's done."

Taylor nodded and watched as Isaac's face resumed its earlier hardness. They didn't say goodbye, only exchanged a small nod that said more than a word could have. Putting his earbuds back in, Taylor jogged out of the driveway and on down the street, determined to run until his feet could carry him no further.

When his run finally brought him back around to his house, Taylor fell in the door and collapsed on the couch. He attempted to watch some television to dull his mind even further, but it didn't work. Although his body was exhausted, his brain was still working in overdrive.

He remembered the letter, and decided now was as good a time as any to find out what it said.

With heavy feet, he walked down the hallway to his bedroom. He reached for the chest of drawers by the door where he thought he remembered setting the letter during his half-assed attempt at unpacking. He only drew back a handful of dust. Rummaging through the debris littering the floor, he pulled out his laptop bag. It too yielded no letter.

Taylor started to panic. He fell to his knees and began to dig through the mess he'd made after hearing the news about Zac. Scraps of paper from his journal temporarily raised his hopes, but the letter was still nowhere to be found. He was absolutely positive he had packed it-–could remember shoving it in the bag _and_ removing it from the bag as well. Yet it was nowhere to be found.

His best hope of getting any answers had disappeared, just like its author.


	4. Secrets Written

Taylor barely slept that night. He spent hours searching for the letter, to no avail, until he finally collapsed onto his bed, still clothed. All night he was haunted by dreams of Charlotte and Shiloh; at times it seemed the woman slipping farther from his grasp was both of them at the same time. 

In the morning, he stumbled to the kitchen feeling as though he hadn't slept a wink and turned the coffee pot on. While he waited for it to brew, he wandered to the living room and flipped on the television. It was still early in the morning and every channel was filled with news. A promotional photo of Zac smiled at him from the left corner of the screen. He didn't bother to turn the volume up to hear what the anchor was saying, and he knew if he changed the channel it would only be more of the same. In a way, he hated the fame for making it impossible to escape news of his brother's disappearance. But he knew that if they weren't "celebrities," the police probably wouldn't even care that Zac was gone. 

In frustration, he threw the television remote across the room. It made a satisfying crunch against the wall. Taylor knew that little bit of violence didn't change a thing; if anything, it made him feel even more useless. He could do nothing to fix this situation. He was completely useless.

"Couldn't even hold onto a damn letter," he mumbled. In his mind, he finished the sentence, _and it might be the last one Zac ever writes._

He walked back into the kitchen, happy to see that at least the coffee pot was cooperating with him, and poured himself a cup. Just as he took the first sip, the telephone rang. He glanced at the caller ID before picking it up.

_Tulsa Police Department_

Seeing those three words again made Taylor shake so badly he nearly dropped his coffee cup. Setting it on the counter top, he picked up the phone and just managed to squeak out, "Hello?"

"Is this Taylor Hanson speaking? This is Detective Davies; we spoke yesterday."

"Yes, this is Taylor," he said, his voice still weak and pathetic. He dreaded the detective's next question.

After some paper shuffling and throat clearing, the detective spoke again, "We just wanted to call and let you know that there's been a bit of a lead in the case. There's a possible sighting of Zac outside of St. Louis at a truck stop. We haven't been able to fully follow up on that lead yet, but I thought it best to keep you informed."

"I appreciate it," Taylor said. "St. Louis, is that right?"

"A smaller city nearby, yes. Eureka, Missouri. Does that have any significance to you?"

"No," Taylor answered. It was half a lie. He himself had stopped in Eureka-–he remembered the name-–on his way to Chicago months earlier. Could Zac have been headed to Chicago? Taylor didn't want to give the police any indication of that for fear it would only cast more suspicion on him.

"Now, we're going to be following up on that with their local police to see if we can confirm whether or not that was indeed your brother, but right now we can't really say. In the meantime, it would be really good if you could bring in that letter."

Taylor felt his stomach turn. "Well... the thing is, I can't quite find it. I'm not even sure I brought it here from Chicago now."

He could hear the officer's disappointment in the silence that followed. 

"I see," Davies began."Well, we don't know that the letter could help us, but of course we won't know anything at all until you find it. Just try your best. You know every little thing can prove valuable in these situations."

Taylor sighed. "Yes, I know. I'll keep looking for it."

"I know these kind of situations are very tough," the officer said, then stopped himself awkwardly, as though he thought better of what he had planned to say. "We appreciate anything you can do to help, and we'll keep looking as hard as we can for your brother."

"Thanks," Taylor said, unsure of how else to respond. The detective's words were almost kind, even if he still spoke in that official, standoffish way that most police officers seemed to. With one last assurance that he would continue to look for the letter, he ended the conversation and hung up. 

Although it had been short, the conversation left Taylor feeling drained. He wanted nothing more than to crawl back into his bed, ignore the fact that he used to share it with Charlotte, and sleep the day away. Surely there must be something productive he could do, Taylor thought. Sleep might have been selfishly satisfying, but he also felt the need to do something, anything, to keep himself from feeling completely helpless.

As always, he turned to his music.

He had left many of his notebooks in storage in the guest room when he fled to Chicago, and he felt a nagging urge to dig those very notebooks out and pore through them for a song to busy his mind with. He didn't feel quite up to visiting the studio on his parents' property, but he could sit down at the piano in the living room and have a go at some of the lyrics lurking in his old notebooks. Taylor didn't see the harm in that.

Full of a sudden resolve to be productive, Taylor walked briskly down the hallway to the guest room. Eventually he had planned to have a studio built into their house, but it hadn't materialized before everything changed. Instead, he kept boxes of music and lyrics in the guest room, along with several of his guitars and keyboards. He always meant to organize it, but he hadn't even managed that. When he moved out, he grabbed a handful of notebooks and one guitar, and didn't give the room a second thought.

He pulled the door open and found that it looked exactly as he pictured it. Just like everything else in the house, it seemed suspended in motion, stuck at the moment he had walked out. The air in the room felt oppressive and he imagined it was the weight of all the memories he had stored in it. The crates full of notebooks and loose sheets of paper held years and years worth of his life, distilled into lyrics and melodies. He knew that there were several unfinished love songs to Charlotte lurking in the room, and he hoped not to run into any of those.

After standing there for several minutes, just taking in the scene, Taylor grabbed a crate at random. He had no idea at all what it contained, but if he spent much more time looking around at the chaos of the room, he wouldn't get anything done. With the crate in his arms, he hurried to the living room where his favorite piano sat on display and hopefully still in tune.

A fine layer of dust covered the piano's surface and Taylor hurriedly wiped down the keys and plucked a few of them to test the sound. He decided it was good enough for now. He wasn't planning to record anything, after all. He just wanted to _play_. 

He pulled a loose page out of the box and discovered that it was a piece of sheet music. The composition was one he quickly recognized-–he had been working on it several years before, but had never finished it. It was a slow piece that had gone through several versions of lyrics; it seemed the song could never quite decide if it was sad or romantic. _Maybe both_ , Taylor decided as he played his way through the unfinished verses.

He still could not find the right words for the song, and so after playing through it, he set it on top of the piano to look at later. He leafed through the crate again, looking for something else that might strike his fancy. A small blue notebook caught his eye. Taylor didn't remember writing in it, but he knew he had been through so many notebooks that he would never remember them all. He had a tendency to misplace them and buy a new one, only for the original to turn up later. It had always frustrated Charlotte, as she was usually the one to find the original notebook.

Opening the small blue book, he instantly realized that the writing inside was not his own. It was Charlotte's. Taylor felt a cold chill creep up his spine, almost as though he had unearthed a ghost by opening the notebook. He flipped through a few pages and realized it was a diary. Nearly every page had a date at the top and it looked as though Charlotte had started this diary only a few months before her death. Taylor wondered how it had ended up mixed in with his music; he must have assumed it was his and packed it up with the other notebooks when they were packing to move into the house.

He knew he should put it down, shut its cover and not pry into her life. It made him nauseous to realize that he was reading her words completely without her consent-–a consent that he could not get. Yet, Taylor wondered if something in this journal could explain, finally, what had happened to make Charlotte do what she had done. Even though it felt wrong, he had to keep reading. He flipped to a random page just a few weeks before her death.

 

_July 14, 2008  
I still don't know how to tell Taylor. Shiloh says I should just be honest, but I don't know. I honestly thought everything would get better after the engagement, but it hasn't. Everything still feels so empty, maybe even more than before. Why can't I just be happy? How do you explain that kind of feeling to the man you're supposed to love, anyway? I mean, I do love him..._

_I just don't think Taylor will understand. He's always so happy. At least, he seems that way. And I guess I do too. So maybe he would understand, but it's still terrifying to think of telling him. What if he thinks I'm not happy with him? What if he thinks I want to leave? I couldn't put him through that kind of worry. So I don't care what Shiloh says. This is going to stay my secret, at least for now._

 

Taylor had to read the words several times to let them sink in. She was right; until her death, which he hadn't wanted to accept as a suicide, Taylor had barely suspected that Charlotte was anything but happy. She hadn't seemed all that excited about planning the wedding, but he had just assumed she was distracted from moving into the new house. She had wanted that, Taylor was certain. She loved their little house. It couldn't have been him that she wasn't happy with.

 

_July 29, 2008  
It feels like everyone is starting to realize something is wrong with me. Diana keeps calling, wanting to ask questions about the wedding plans and I don't have any answers for her. It feels like my world is closing in around me. If I told anyone but Shiloh, they would think I just didn't want to be married. I think I'll just let Diana plan the whole thing and agree to whatever she wants. Maybe that way, she won't notice that I really just can't excited about any of it. _

_It isn't Taylor, though. I swear it isn't. I feel like I spend half my time trying to convince myself of that. I've never loved anyone like I love him, except for... well. I don't want to think about that. About him. Taylor isn't like that. I know he isn't. I don't think I'm afraid that he's going to change once we're married. I think I'm afraid that I will._

_I'm afraid I'm completely unlovable and it's only a matter of time before Taylor notices._

 

Taylor shook his head when he read those words. He couldn't believe Charlotte thought of herself that way. He wanted to know why, but more than that he wanted to see her one last time so he could assure her that he would never, ever, think of her that way. 

 

_August 7, 2008  
I can't believe I finally agreed to see a psychiatrist like Shiloh has been telling me to do for years. She told me that if I didn't, I'd end up being a runaway bride. Maybe she's right. So I made an appointment today when Taylor was gone to the office to work on their new album. That way he won't know, at least not until it happens. Maybe I can even keep it a secret then, but he'll find out eventually._

_I'm so scared, though. I haven't told anyone but Shiloh about what happened. She's the only one who has been with me since high school and knows about James. Taylor thinks we just came to Tulsa for college, but it was to get away from home. I've never been able to give him a good explanation why I don't like going back to visit, even though the last I heard James was doing time in Texas. I didn't hear what he finally got arrested for. Probably for beating some other girl._

_It's been almost a decade, though. When I left for college, I put that all behind me. At least, I thought I had. Now that the wedding is closing in, it's all coming back. It's only a matter of time before I snap and accuse Taylor, when he's done nothing wrong. If that doesn't happen, I'm bound to go off the deep end in some other way._

 

Taylor felt his stomach turn as he read her words-–twice, to be sure he'd understood. He tossed the journal down, sickened by what he had read. Charlotte didn't need to lay it out in detail for him to get the picture. He suddenly understood everything, how in the last few days it had seemed like she was pulling away. He tried to push it out of his mind, but there were moments, maybe even from the beginning, when she seemed almost afraid to let herself be near him.

Carefully, he picked the journal up and flipped ahead a few pages to the last entry, just a few days before her death.

 

_September 4, 2008  
The appointment is Monday. I can't believe it came so quickly. I don't want to go. Shiloh may have to drive me there and physically push me out of the car and into the building. I know I'm being childish, but I just don't know how to do this. The thought of admitting what I let him do... I think it's even worse than the thought of all that happening again with Taylor. If it happened again, I could tell myself I deserved it. That I was just the kind of girl that happened to. I still don't even know if I'd be strong enough to leave if it did happen._

_That's what I don't want to admit. Somewhere inside, I'm still the pathetic, sad little girl that let her first boyfriend shove her around. Who would want to own up to that? Who would want to tell anyone about that? I can't even tell the man I'm going to marry. I sure as hell can't tell some random stranger, even if they are supposed to be able to fix it._

_I don't think anyone can fix it. I don't think anyone can fix me._

 

It read like a novel, Taylor thought. Charlotte couldn't have picked more poignant, chilling words to end on if she had tried. Had she tried? Taylor couldn't tell if Charlotte was planning it or not. If she had truly planned in advance to run her car off the bridge and into the river, nothing in her journal hinted at it. The depression was clear enough, though. Taylor had never been able to think of anything he had done to set her off, but maybe he hadn't needed to. It sounded like she had reached the end of her rope all on her own. He had never truly had any clue about the depression she was hiding.

If he had known, could he have changed anything? Taylor didn't know and he didn't like to think that way, but he couldn't help it. Everything in his life was another reminder of what he'd lost. Every day he wondered what he could have done differently. Even if he could have loved her more, he now realized, it might not have been enough to heal the wounds he hadn't caused.


	5. Baby Furniture

Taylor couldn't sleep. That was becoming his norm since arriving back in Tulsa. Once again, Charlotte plagued his dreams during the short periods when he actually managed to fall asleep. In the dreams, he found himself playing the role of her abuser. Even though he knew it was a dream, he could not stop himself-–that was the worst part of all. He would startle himself awake, screaming at himself for hurting her, and then fall back into the same dream. It was like he was watching himself from the outside, unable to stop his fists from flying, unable to stop hurling curses he knew he didn't mean.

By mid-morning, he gave up on ever sleeping enough to feel rested. He pulled himself from his bed, shuffled to the kitchen and turned on the coffee machine. He briefly considered not even bothering with a cup and just drinking it all straight from the pot. It wouldn't make a difference, he decided. He was just doomed to drift around half-awake and half-asleep, no matter how long he spent in bed or how quickly he consumed the largest amount of caffeine possible.

He paced the kitchen nervously until the machine finished brewing and poured himself a cup, black. Usually he'd add so much sugar and cream that you couldn't even tell there was coffee in the cup at all, but he just couldn't be bothered. Treating himself to anything nice just seemed silly. He sipped the bitter drink and continued pacing, eventually finding himself in the living room, staring out the window that faced Shiloh's apartment.

It was a nice little apartment complex, he thought. The whole thing had originally been a large house, but somewhere along the way it had been converted into apartments with cute little flower boxes on the windows and brightly painted front doors. Not a bad place to raise a kid-–his kid, he reminded himself. Shiloh's car was in the driveway and he could see her struggling to remove a large box from the back. He realized he should go help her with whatever it was.

Taylor was glad that he had once again fallen into bed with his pants still on. That saved him time. He chugged down the rest of his coffee, ran a hand through his hair and hoped he was presentable enough. He barely paused at the door long enough to slip on his shoes before jogging outside and crossing through the small patch of lawn that separated their driveways.

“I'm not sure, but I don't think pregnant women are supposed to do heavy lifting like that,” Taylor said.

Shiloh rolled her eyes. “In case you hadn't noticed, I do a lot of things I shouldn't do.”

“I'm pretty sure you just insulted me,” Taylor replied. “But I'm surprisingly okay with that. I just can't even be upset about anything else right now. I have reached my depression saturation level. Now, let go of the damn box.”

She jumped back and made a big show of throwing her hands in the air, away from the box. Taylor fought the urge to roll his own eyes. With Shiloh out of the way, he could see that the box contained a baby crib boasting state of the art features.

He gulped and mustered all his strength to lift the box out of her trunk and to the pavement. “Where do you want it?”

“The nursery?” Shiloh said, as though he had asked the stupidest question ever.

“That would be helpful if I knew where that room was,” Taylor replied, deciding he'd be better off pushing the box than trying to carry it the whole way. He could only manage so many shows of strength in one day, and Shiloh had a way of stripping away his masculinity with just a few words.

Without a word, Shiloh turned and motioned for Taylor to follow her. He awkwardly half-pushed, half-rolled the box across her driveway, not lifting it again until he had to take the two steps up into the house. He was struck by the lack of decoration; Shiloh's home looked about as lived in as his, and he hadn't lived in it for almost a year. He couldn't think of any excuse for Shiloh not to decorate with at least a few posters or candles-–anything to make it seem like she actually existed in her apartment.

“Here it is,” Shiloh said, flinging open the door and stepping back to allow Taylor room to negotiate the doorway with the box in tow.

Like the rest of her apartment, this room–-the one she had called the nursery–-was nearly bare. The walls were white and the windows didn't even have any curtains. Some boxes labeled “Baby Clothes” and a few packages of diapers were the only items in the room. 

Shiloh leaned against the door frame and mindlessly ran a hand across her swollen stomach. “You can just leave it in the floor anywhere. I'll put it together later. I've got the changing table in my car too, but I can handle that. You don't need to keep playing superhero.”

“I'm not playing,” Taylor said. “I mean, I'm not playing _and_ I'm not a superhero. You obviously needed help, whether you're going to admit it or not. I would have been helping you a lot more, for a lot longer, if I'd had any clue...”

“Well. It's too late to talk about what you would have done, alright?”

Taylor winced at her harsh words, but didn't let it stop him. He pulled his keys from his pocket and sliced open the packing tape around the edges of the box. He was putting that damn crib together, whether Shiloh liked it or not. “So, I can't really tell from the decorations. Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Is _what_ a boy or a girl?”

He looked up at Shiloh's face, wondering if he had heard her right. She stared at him, arms crossed and one eyebrow raised. It wasn't a question; it was a dare. Taylor cleared his throat. “Our baby. Are we having a girl or a boy?”

“A girl.”

Taylor decided it was best not to point out that Shiloh didn't argue with him for calling the child _theirs_. She had allowed him that one small victory, but he knew she could easily retract the win if he pressed the issue too much. Still, he couldn't help smiling to himself as he opened the box and began removing pieces. He really had no clue how to assemble baby furniture, but he wasn't going to let Shiloh know that.

“You're going to need a screwdriver, you know.”

 _So much for not letting my cluelessness show_ , Taylor thought. He turned the instructions over in his hands, but couldn't make heads or tales of them. “I guess I am. And possibly a translator for these instructions.”

Shiloh chuckled. “Alright, here's the plan. I'll get you all the tools you need, and I'll read the directions. You just do what I say.”

“I can handle that.”

They fell into an easy, if not comfortable, routine. Shiloh read the directions and Taylor did his best to follow them. A few times he had to stop and study the illustrations before he understood where he had gone wrong. Shiloh wasn't exactly slow to point out all the ways that his crib did not resemble the one on the box, either.

By the time he reached the last piece of his construction project, Taylor could keep quiet no more. He screwed in the final screw, then turned to Shiloh. He stared her down for a moment before speaking.

“Shy. I need to ask you something, and you better answer me. You owe me after this.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Taylor. I'm forever indebted to your for putting together a baby crib. What's your question?”

“Why... why didn't you tell me about Charlotte? Why didn't she tell me what was wrong?”

“That's two questions,” Shiloh replied. “And you're going to have to be more specific than that.”

Taylor could tell by the look in Shiloh's eyes, the way they clouded over at his question, that she knew exactly what he was referring to, but she was going to be stubborn. He would have to spell it all out before she said a word. “I found Charlotte's diary yesterday. So don't play dumb, Shy. I know you knew exactly what she had been through, but neither of you ever felt the need to tell me, it seems.”

“It was her life. It wasn't my job to tell you.”

Shiloh's calm demeanor only angered Taylor. He practically growled, “Well, she can't tell me now. She's dead. And apparently you were content to let me go on never knowing why. Jesus, the police even thought I was involved and you kept your mouth shut the whole time!”

Shiloh stepped in close to Taylor, staring at him, daring him to look away from her eyes. “I don't know what her diary says, alright? But I do know what she went through and I know it was killing her that she felt she couldn't trust you when you hadn't actually given her a reason not to. It was tearing her up inside, but she thought it would only make things worse if she told you about her past. About that bastard.”

“You were her friend through all of that,” Taylor said. It wasn't a question. He knew it was the truth. “You didn't do a damn thing to stop him? You just let that happen to her?”

“Oh, don't you dare blame for that too. You think she didn't try to hide it from me, too? People keep secrets, Taylor. People _lie_. It's what we do. If I had known sooner, maybe I could have stopped it. Maybe not. But I'll end up like Charlotte if I spent all my time thinking about what I might have done.”

Taylor backed away, feeling defeated. “I just wish that for once in my life, people would tell me everything. Everyone leaves me in the dark all the time and I'm fucking sick of it.”

“Poor, pitiful Taylor.” Shiloh spat the words at him. “Maybe we're trying to spare you. You're not in the dark. You're living in the light while the rest of us are stuck with the dark, awful truths that you really don't seem capable of dealing with. You should be thanking us.”

Taylor threw drown the screwdriver and stormed out of the room. He wanted to look like he wasn't thoroughly defeated, like he was storming away in anger at how wrong Shiloh was. But he had a feeling he looked more like a pouting child who hadn't gotten their way. Maybe that's exactly what he was. 

He didn't look back at Shiloh, because he knew that if he did, she would see that his facade of anger was fading away. He wanted to look angry. He did not want to admit to her that she had a point. But he knew that she did. Still, he couldn't resist slamming the front door to his house, even though he doubted she was even watching or listening.

_People lie._

There were fewer true statements to be made. Taylor knew that. He wanted to believe better of the few people he let into his life, the few people he trusted enough to get close to and care about. People like Zac, Charlotte and even Shiloh. But everyone had something to hide. 

Charlotte's secret had been what killed her. It had been eating her up inside with guilt for years, and Taylor had been blissfully unaware the entire time. He couldn't go back and change that now. He could only accept what had had happened. Charlotte couldn't live with her secret, but she couldn't tell it either. Her solution hadn't been ideal, and he would never be able to forgive the circumstances that forced her to it, but maybe someday he would be able to forgive her.

Shiloh's secret was, in a way, his own secret too. They had come together because of the guilt and responsibility they felt over Charlotte's death. Now that both had to live with the consequences of that. But Shiloh hadn't told anyone the truth. She had held inside, for seven months, the truth of what she and Taylor had done. 

Was it her secret that had driven Zac away?

Taylor didn't want to answer that question. He was so tired of guilt and blame. Maybe things just happened, and no one was really to blame. They just made their choice, good or bad, and that was all there was to it. 

He couldn't help wondering what Zac's secret might have been. _Might have been_... Taylor hated that he was already beginning to think of Zac in the past tense. He wasn't dead. He couldn't be dead. Taylor refused to believe it. If he was dead, Taylor would never know what lie Zac was telling.

The biggest question Taylor was left with, however, was about himself. What lie was he telling? What secret was he holding in? He had spent too long blaming others and hating others to think about himself. His thoughts might have been consumed with his own pain, but that wasn't the same. Everything he did and felt was just a reaction to others. Nothing was really his own. 

Somewhere along the way, Taylor had lost himself. He was nothing but a bundle of reactions, without a personality of his own, without thoughts of his own. He would never be able to figure out what his own deep, dark secret was if he didn't find himself first.


	6. Spare

Each day that Taylor sat at home alone, with nothing at all to occupy his time but his thoughts, was a day that he felt closer to going completely insane. He found himself walking by the windows often just to get a glimpse of the outside world. It wasn't as informative or entertaining as watching television for an even wider view of world, but it allowed him to flex his brain in ways that didn't hurt as much as constantly thinking about Zac and Charlotte. 

His living room had big picture windows that allowed him to sit on his couch with a cup of coffee and still have a nearly 360 degree view of his street. Every day, he spent hours there watching as cars drove up and down the street and the neighbors he didn't even know lived their lives just yards away. He invented elaborate histories for each of them just to amuse himself.

The one neighbor he didn't have to invent a history for was Shiloh.

It took him less than a week to memorize her schedule-–when she left for the record store and when she returned in the evenings. She didn't seem to do anything else at all. The few times she did leave her house in the evening, she returned a short time later with bags full of groceries. As far as Taylor could tell, she had no social life at all. At least she left her house, he thought to himself. That put her one step ahead of him.

As he watched her come and go, his mind kept drifting back to the nearly empty nursery room that he knew sat just inside her apartment. While Taylor was sure she was stocking it with the essentials-–he knew he had spotted her carrying in a giant case of diapers one evening-–he feared the room would stay bare and void of any sort of _life_. The thought of his baby living that way, even if Shiloh didn't seem to want his help at all, made him sick.

He knew, though, that Shiloh was far too stubborn to accept his help decorating. It seemed there was nothing he could do. One day, though, when she came home from work, an idea dropped itself right into his lap.

Taylor stood by the window with his coffee, watching as Shiloh fumbled with her keys, growing more and more dismayed by the second. She heaved a sigh that was visible even from where he stood, but he still didn't understand the problem. Then, she reached into the small flower bed next to her steps and picked up a rock. It still took Taylor a moment to realize it was a fake rock housing a spare key.

 _A spare key_ , he thought. It didn't really matter how wrong and technically illegal it was, that spare key was his way into the apartment. 

The next day, Taylor woke up early with determination and a plan. After a shower and a cup of coffee, he drove himself to the nearest Home Depot. As soon as he arrived and began walking up and down the aisles, he realized that he truly didn't have _that_ of a plan. Who was he kidding, anyway? He was a musician, not an interior decorator.

He knew what he needed. He needed Zac. Zac had painted murals in all of their younger siblings' bedrooms, and while Taylor had helped, he knew he wasn't the real artist of the two. He barely trusted himself to paint the nursery one solid color without fucking it up. It felt like he would fuck _everything_ up without Zac.

Taylor knew he couldn't keep thinking like that, though. It wouldn't bring Zac back any faster and it wouldn't soothe his mind. All he could do was just keep living, one tiny baby step at a time. After staring down the aisle of paint chips for what felt like hours, he finally felt inspiration strike. 

Several gallons of paint and a few dozen items from Bed, Bath and Beyond later, Taylor felt like he was ready. 

Taylor knew he still had plenty of time until Shiloh got home for the evening – time to make enough headway on the mural that she would have to either let him finish or paint over it. He only hoped that it would turn it nice enough for her to want to keep it. He tried to stay positive, though, as he drove back home. Once he finally arrived, he parked in his own driveway, even though it meant carrying the supplies across the yard, so that she wouldn't suspect anything until she was inside the apartment.

The actual act of breaking and entering-–because he knew that was really what he was doing-–was a lot easier, mentally and literally, than he assumed it would be. Taylor found that he didn't feel a bit guilty as he searched for the fake rock and slipped the key into Shiloh's door. After a few trips back and forth to get all his supplies inside, he locked the door and put the key back where he had found it. If all went as planned, Shiloh would be none the wiser until she saw his painting.

Taylor wished he'd had time to paint over the bare white walls, too, but he didn't want to push his luck. He wanted to be _finished_ before Shiloh freaked out and threw him out of her home. As he surveyed the room, he decided that the white would have to do. At least it was a nice blank canvas to start from.

He started by piling up the crib and what few other pieces of furniture and boxes of supplies Shiloh had in the middle of the floor. That way, he figured he would be at least a little less likely to splatter it all with paint. A few drop cloths spread around the floor near the wall he planned to put his mural on provided further Taylor-proofing. With that done, he supposed there was nothing left to do but just dive right into the painting itself.

Taylor plucked a pencil from his hair and began to sketch his design on the wall. It wouldn't be anything as impressive as Zac could have done, but as he hastily drew the outlines, he could see it coming together in his mind. Unlike everything else in his life, this might not be a total disaster. 

The outlining seemed to take hours, only because he was so determined to get it right, even if his light pencil lines would soon be covered in paint. Finally, Taylor stepped back and admired his handiwork-–a thin, barely visible tree stretching across the wall, with leaves strewn all around. It wouldn't be a masterpiece, but he thought he could manage to color in between the lines well enough to make it look good.

He dove right into the painting itself with little hesitation. There was no point in delaying it further, Taylor thought. He opened up his cans of brown and pink paint-–because why couldn't he paint his baby girl's tree pink if he wanted to?-–and he set to work. 

Usually Taylor enjoyed painting, at least when it turned out how he wanted. He could get frustrated easily, though, especially if he compared anything he created to Zac's, because it rarely measured up. That day, he found it to be extremely cathartic. Things were still far from perfect, and not likely to improve any time soon, but with each brushstroke, he felt that he was really doing something _right_. It made him feel far better than he could have anticipated.

For the first time since returning to Tulsa, he felt somewhat at ease. Not quite happy, but perhaps a tiny bit closer. He wasn't sure _happy_ was something he would ever truly feel again.

Taylor didn't take a single break; he worked all afternoon, coloring in the tree trunk and then painting the leaves various shades of pink at random. He was surprised how quickly it all seemed to go. Before starting on the palest shade of pink, he paused to check the time on his phone. 5:45. By his estimation, Shiloh would be home any moment. It was only then that he began to feel a little nervous again, but nevertheless he picked up his paintbrush to add the last color.

He had only painted a handful of the pastel pink leaves when a sound caught his ear. Pausing and standing as still as possible, he strained to listen to it. Definitely a key in a lock, Taylor decided. Seconds later, he heard the unmistakable creak of the front door being pushed open.

 _Here goes nothing_ , Taylor thought to himself. 

He lifted his paintbrush back to the wall and resumed painting in between the lines of a small leaf. He tried desperately not to listen to the sound of footsteps down the hall, and nearly succeeded. He almost didn't notice when the footsteps ceased right outside the nursery door. What he couldn't ignore, though, was Shiloh's voice.

“What the _fuck_?”


	7. Roots

Taylor spun around to face her, his paintbrush still dangling from his fingertips. He gave Shiloh a sheepish grin, and while it didn't seem to soothe her anger any, it did at least appear to confuse her enough to keep her from speaking again.

“Surprise?” Taylor offered, still grinning.

“I'll say it is,” Shiloh replied, bracing herself against the door frame. “How the fuck did you get in here?”

“Can I plead the fifth?”

“It's probably in your best interest. You know I'm going to have to paint over that when I move out.”

Taylor frowned. “Are you planning on moving out?”

“No, I wasn't,” Shiloh replied, sighing.

“Then what's the big deal?” Taylor asked.

Shiloh shot him an angry look but didn't reply. Taylor balanced his paintbrush on top of the paint can and took a few tentative steps toward her. He was a little afraid that she was going to slap him or punch him, but when she didn't seem _that_ angry, he stepped in even closer and put his hands on her arms.

“Look, Shy,” he said. “I know I kind of went behind your back here, but I just wanted to do something for you... for the baby. For _our_ baby. You might not like how I did it, but I promise my heart was in the right place here.”

Shiloh frowned, but didn't push him away. “It just... it feels like you keep saying, without even really saying it, that I'm going to be a horrible mother.”

“I didn't say that,” Taylor replied.

“But you did, even if you didn't realize it,” Shiloh replied. “Can't put a crib together, can't decorate her baby's room... and let's not forget the part where this baby wouldn't exist if I hadn't cheated on your brother.”

“And I didn't _blame_ you for any of that. I only wanted to help. To do my part. I know I can't make up for the past seven months, but I'm prepared to do as much as I can now.”

“That's fine,” Shiloh finally said. “But from now on, let me decide exactly what and how much you're going to do.”

Taylor sighed, but nodded. It wasn't a perfect arrangement, but at least Shiloh hadn't screamed or kicked him out of the apartment. Given her temper, he thought that was nearly good enough to be considered a win. With a tiny grin, he asked, “So... does this mean I can finish painting?”

“Yeah, yeah...” Shiloh replied. “Just don't make a mess, okay? I'm going to change clothes and cook dinner. If you're anything like Zac, I bet you haven't stopped to eat all day.”

Taylor and Shiloh both lapsed into an awkward silence then. The simple mention of Zac's name seemed to take them both aback and remind them of why they were together in the first place. Taylor sucked in a breath before finally nodding.

“Yeah, you're right... I haven't. You don't have to cook for me, though.”

“Least I can do,” Shiloh muttered, then walked away.

Taylor wished he could have stopped her or said something else, but he was still shaken from the mention of Zac, too. Shiloh's relationship with Zac had always baffled him, but it was clear that she was suffering in his absence. She had a strange way of showing it, Taylor thought, but she was definitely in pain. He knew there wasn't really anything he could do. Instead, he just walked back into the nursery room and picked up his paintbrush to finish what he had started.

He threw himself completely into the painting, mostly just to distract himself from thinking about Zac. Even the smallest tasks to keep him busy were important, he had found. The window watching that led him to plan this mural, for example. It might not have occupied a great deal of time, but it allowed him to use a part of his brain for something other than imagining the worst possible scenarios that might have happened to Zac. Right then, all that mattered were the tiny little pastel pink leaves on the wall. Every bit of Taylor's attention was focused on painting each one between the lines as thought his life depending on it.

He only snapped back to reality when he finished the last leaf and stepped back to admire his handiwork. It wasn't as good as – no. Taylor refused to let himself even say the name in his mind again. It wasn't a masterpiece, but it was pretty good, he decided. He was just beginning to pull up his drop clothes when Shiloh appeared in the doorway again.

“Dinner's almost ready. It's not much, but...” She trailed off and shrugged, then glanced at Taylor's painting and smiled faintly. “It does look nice.”

Taylor gave Shiloh a shrug of his own. “I just wanted to do something, you know? I'm sorry if... if I was out of line.”

“No,” Shiloh replied. “I mean, yeah. You were. But it's okay. Why a tree, though?”

“Well, I didn't know how much you really wanted me to be around. But I wanted her to know that she was loved, you know? Cared for. Protected. So I thought... a tree. A place she can take shelter. A reminder that she's got roots, you know, a family? That sounds really cheesy, doesn't it?”

“Yeah,” Shiloh said, smirking. “But cheese is your specialty.”

Taylor resisted the urge to groan, huff or otherwise pout over her remark. Shiloh had always mocked his music, so he figured he shouldn't have been surprised that she was still mocking his general cheesiness, too. He had never known if she was sincere when she assured Zac that his songs were much better and less cheesy, and he had a feeling it wasn't the right time to ask. Instead, he just glanced around the room, then back to Shiloh.

“So, dinner?” He asked. “Then maybe we can finish decorating?”

“Sounds like a plan. Hope you like spaghetti.”

“Love it,” Taylor replied, holding out his arm for Shiloh.

She rolled her eyes, but hooked her arm in his anyway. Taylor bit his lip to keep from remarking that she didn't seem to mind his cheesiness so much right then.

****

An hour later, after devouring all of Shiloh's homemade spaghetti and garlic bread and helping her to rinse the dishes and stick them in the dishwasher, Taylor found himself back in the nursery again, this time with Shiloh by his side.

Once his own painting mess had been cleaned up, there wasn't a great deal left to do. All the basic furniture was there-–crib, changing table, a small chest of drawers and a rocking chair. Taylor insisted that Shiloh do nothing while he push all the furniture back into its rightful place, and he was pleased both that she complied and that he was able to move it all on his own. He really didn't think he could have handled making himself look weak and dumb in front of her.

Taylor wasn't sure why Shiloh's opinion mattered to him so much. Part of it probably stemmed from the fact that she was so opinionated; whatever she thought about you, she was sure to let you know, even if it wasn't exactly nice. There was more to it than that, though. He could mostly blow off her opinions before, but now she was practically the only person he had left. He _needed_ her, and he hoped that she needed him, too.

“Taylor? Tay?”

“Hmm?” He replied, glancing back at Shiloh.

“I asked what you wanted to do now,” Shiloh said, her brow furrowing a little as she looked at Taylor. 

He realized he must have drifted off into his thoughts for a moment. With a slight smile, he motioned toward the pile of shopping bags by the door. “Just finish decorating, I guess. You can put the bedding on while I hang the curtains.”

Shiloh stared at Taylor for a moment, as though she were trying to figure out where he had gone, but she didn't question him further. Instead, she retrieved a small step stool from the kitchen so that he could hang the curtains, while she began sorting through all the blankets, sheets and pillows he had bought.

With the two of them working, it didn't take very long to finish decorating the nursery. Taylor helped Shiloh affix the ruffled pink skirt to the bottom of the crib, and together they rolled out a brown and pink polka dotted rug that nearly covered the entire floor. To Taylor's surprise, Shiloh then opened the closet and began pulling out bags and boxes of baby necessities she had bought. Together, they worked to organize the little outfits, blankets and things into drawers. 

While they worked, neither of them said very much. The silence wasn't awkward, though. It was nice to just work on something together without arguing or talking about anything that might lead them into awkward territory. Taylor enjoyed it.

“There,” Taylor said, placing a small stuffed bear on top of the pillows in the crib. “I think that's everything.”

Shiloh walked over and stood next to him, leaning a little against Taylor's side. She sighed softly. “It looks really nice in here. And it just... _feels_ better. Feels more like maybe this is how things are supposed to be, you know?”

Taylor nodded, although he didn't totally understand. There were still a lot of things in his life that felt very, very wrong, but being here with Shiloh was the one thing that actually did feel right. Maybe he did understand what she meant, after all.

Shiloh looked up at Taylor, and he turned his head to look down at her. As if on cue, they both yawned. Shiloh giggled. “I bet you're just as exhausted as I am.”

“I have worked hard today,” Taylor replied, then shrugged. “But I enjoyed it.”

“Why don't we get some sleep, then?” Shiloh asked, yawning again as she turned to walk out of the room.

Taylor watched her walking away, but stayed rooted on the spot. “I should probably clean up the rest of my mess before I go.”

“That's not necessary,” Shiloh replied, turning to lean against the door frame and look back at Taylor. “You can clean it up tomorrow... before you go home.”

Taylor blinked slowly, the true meaning of her words washing over him. Shiloh was asking-–no, practically demanding-–that he spend the night. He couldn't find a reason to argue with that. It might not mean anything other than that she wanted someone to warm up her bed, but whatever it meant, Taylor decided that he was okay with it.


	8. Bacon and Eggs

Taylor couldn't remember the last time he had slept well. Most nights, since Charlotte's death and especially since his return to Tulsa, he didn't feel as though he had slept at all. He tossed and turned for hours, finally waking up feeling as though he had done nothing more than close his eyes for a second. 

That morning, however, he woke up feeling incredibly well rested.

It took him several minutes to figure out where he was or just why he felt so comfortable. His mind only began to figure it out when he felt the bed shifting a little and glanced over to see that someone else was laying with him. The covers were pulled up high, but her long black hair still hung out like a rusted halo around the pillow.

Shiloh.

Taylor couldn't resist the urge to snuggle closer to her for a moment. Shiloh slept so soundly, he knew, that it wouldn't wake her at all. She hardly stirred when he grew bolder and wrapped his arm around her waist. His confidence only grew. Knowing it was probably a horrible idea, he still couldn't stop himself from running his hand across her stomach. He wanted desperately to feel the baby move or kick or _something_. Some tiny reminder that there really was a life inside there.

He had a feeling that if Shiloh woke up while he was touching her, she would be the one giving him a kick.

With a sigh, Taylor pulled himself away from Shiloh and rolled over. The clock on her nightstand showed that it was already nearing eight in the morning. He was pretty sure that Shiloh didn't need to be at work for a few more hours, based on his creepy window watching, so he didn't dare try to wake her. He couldn't sleep any longer, though, no matter how well rested he felt. Instead, Taylor pulled himself out of the bed and wiggled back into the jeans Shiloh had insisted he take off before getting in bed.

Taylor ran his hand along the hallway wall as he walked back through her apartment to the kitchen. Their night together had been very strange, he decided. Shiloh had insisted that he sleep in her bed, and she had conceded to letting him wrap an arm around her, but her back had remained turned to him the entire time. There was nothing romantic about it at all. He wasn't really sure why she had suggested it in the first place.

No, there had definitely been nothing romantic about the night. Taylor wasn't even sure that he _wanted_ anything romantic from Shiloh. Despite their one night together, he had never seen her as anything more than Charlotte's infuriating best friend and Zac's on again, off again girlfriend. He didn't love her. He did care about her, though, especially when he knew she was going through a lot, too.

So maybe it wasn't romantic. That didn't mean he couldn't do something nice for her.

Not bothering to be quiet, since he knew she could sleep through anything, Taylor began digging through her refrigerator and cabinets until he found all the ingredients he needed for a nice breakfast. Shiloh had a thing for junk food; he remembered that about her. That combined with the memory of fixing endless fried eggs for his own mother when she was pregnant with Zoe gave him the motivation he needed to pull out all the stops and cook her the best breakfast he could manage with what food she had on hand.

Luckily, Taylor was a pretty decent cook, if he did say so himself, and Shiloh kept her small kitchen quite well stocked. Taylor didn't know for sure how she took her eggs, so he decided to fry a few as well as scramble some, both with and without some of the shredded cheese he found hiding behind the milk. He also found a package of bacon and a can of biscuits to finish off the meal. It wasn't the fanciest breakfast he had ever cooked, but he figured it was better to stick to the basics; that gave him less chance of offending Shiloh or cooking something she wouldn't eat.

If Shiloh had a coffee maker, Taylor would have considered it a perfect breakfast. Instead, he settled for pouring two glasses of orange juice and waiting to see which happened first – Shiloh waking up or the timer on the biscuits going off.

“Taylor?” Shiloh called out, just as the oven's timer dinged. “Do I smell bacon?”

“I don't know, do you?” Taylor called back, grinning even though he knew Shiloh couldn't see him yet.

A moment later, she appeared in the doorway, leaning heavily against it and rubbing her eyes as though she wasn't sure that what she saw in front of her was real. Taylor just continued to grin as he pulled the biscuits from the oven and sat them onto the counter. 

“You probably do smell bacon,” he said, still grinning.

Shiloh only rolled her eyes in reply. She shuffled toward the oven and surveyed the variety of pans on top of it for a moment. Taylor thought he saw a tiny smile flicker across her face, but it was gone so quickly that he couldn't be sure. There was a definite smirk on her face as she nudged him out of the way to pull a plate from the dish drainer. A smirk that didn't also come with a complete refusal to eat his cooking was probably about the best he could hope for, Taylor figured.

He watched with amusement as Shiloh filled her plate up with heaping helpings of everything he had made, then dug butter and jelly out of the refrigerator to slather over her biscuits. He couldn't help being pleased with himself, even if Shiloh had yet to, and likely wouldn't, thank him for it. Once she had helped herself and sat down at the table, he scooped some of the remaining bacon and scrambled eggs with cheese onto a plate of his own. While he did love bacon, he wasn't a huge fan of breakfast in the actual morning. But he figured it would have been strange not to eat his own cooking while Shiloh practically gorged herself on it.

“I forgot you were such a good cook,” Shiloh mumbled between bites. “Charlotte used to go on and on about the stuff you'd cook for her.”

At the mention of her name, both Taylor and Shiloh paused and stared at each other. The awkward moment passed quickly, though, which took Taylor by surprise. Perhaps in time it wouldn't hurt so much to simply mention Charlotte's name. He only hoped that pain wasn't replaced by the pain of mentioning Zac's name, but he had a feeling it would be. 

“Thanks,” he finally replied, giving Shiloh the best smile he could manage.

Neither of them said much for the rest of the meal, but the silence wasn't as awkward as Taylor thought it might be. Shiloh seemed, slowly, to be accepting that whether she liked it or not, Taylor _was_ going to be a part of her life. 

When they finished, he refused to let Shiloh help with the dishes. He had to all but shove her from the room so that she wouldn't start raking out leftovers into the trash. Not that there had been very many leftovers. Taylor couldn't resist wrapping up a leftover biscuit or two and the few remaining pieces of bacon for his own lunch; he'd found it difficult to even muster up the energy to go shopping, so his house was getting quite low on food. He promised himself to replace what he had taken of Shiloh's as soon as possible.

With his lunch wrapped up and the dishes all washed and stuck in the dish drainer, he padded back down the hallway to retrieve the rest of his clothes and painting supplies. As much as he didn't want to leave Shiloh alone, he also knew it was better not to overstay his welcome.

He heard water running from within her bathroom and thought it best not to bother her. Instead, he stepped into the nursery and gathered up the trash he had scattered around the day before. He stuffed his paintbrushes, drop cloth and cans of paint into one shopping bag, and gathered up all the rest of the trash into another. There was really less of it than he remembered, and it didn't take long at all before the nursery looked absolutely perfect.

Once that was finished and he had carried the bags to the front door, he went back to Shiloh's room to finish dressing. His jacket and shoes were scattered around the floor and he stooped down to pick them up. Shiloh walked back into the room, her pajamas replaced with jeans and a t-shirt, just as Taylor was tying his left shoe. 

"Leaving?” She asked, not seeming particularly concerned either way.

“Figured I'd give you a few hours free of me before you had to leave for work,” he replied.

“I appreciate that,” Shiloh said, but her smirk said slightly different.

Taylor finished tying his shoe lace, then stood up and glanced around the room. It was a bit of a mess. He wasn't one to judge, though. Charlotte was incredibly neat, and the habit of keeping things cleaned up had rubbed off on him, but it wasn't really his natural state. 

Shiloh must have noticed Taylor's eyes roaming around, because she took a few steps toward her small desk and shuffled the envelopes and other papers on it nervously before finally shoving them all into a drawer.

“I could clean up a bit while you're at work,” Taylor offered. “I mean, I don't really have anything else to do all day. I get really bored.”

Shiloh spun around and glared at him. “You really don't need to do that. You should just leave, actually.”

Taylor frowned. He wasn't sure where her sudden change of mood had come from. Did the implication that she needed to clean offend her that much? Taylor supposed it was possible. It was generally impossible to predict what would set Shiloh off, and the pregnancy hormones couldn't have possibly improved that little personality quirk. 

He instinctively backed away from her and raised his hands in defeat. “Alright, sorry. The offer still stands, though, but I'll go now. See you later, Shy.”

“Later,” Shiloh replied, her fingers nervously playing with the drawer pull on her desk. 

Taylor wanted to say or do something to comfort her, but he knew it was best not to even try. Shiloh would calm down in time, but continuing to argue when she was upset was like poking a hornet's nest. It was just asking for trouble in the worst possible way.

With one last, tiny smile in her general direction, Taylor shoved his hands in his pockets and walked out of her bedroom. He picked up his trash by the door on his way out, hoping and praying that it wasn't the last time Shiloh let him into her apartment, and her life, so easily.


	9. Waiting Room

A few days passed and Taylor saw no more of Shiloh than just her waddling figure going to and from her car in the mornings and afternoons. He wasn't sure if she was deliberately avoiding him or if she was just too busy, and he didn't dare try to find out.

By the third day, he had given up even watching for her at the window. He didn't sleep well alone, but he still stayed in bed as late as he wanted before finally dragging himself to the shower and then downing several cups of coffee as though he had actually slept enough to need it. Instead of going to the window, he turned on the television and tried to find a program that didn't have some stupid celebrity news portion that might mention Zac. He really didn't think he could handle that.

Taylor had just started on his third cup of coffee when his phone began to ring. A quick check of the caller id revealed that it was his mother, and while part of him dreaded what she might have to say, he knew that the call was coming eventually. He couldn't avoid the news about Zac forever.

“Hello?”

“Taylor, honey, I wasn't sure if you would be awake yet.”

“Couldn't sleep,” he admitted, the sentence punctuated by a perfectly timed yawn.

“I don't think any of us are sleeping well these days,” she replied, ever the diplomat. There was no real hidden meaning there, just an acknowledgment that things were tough on everyone. Taylor liked his mother's ability to be so calm and collected all the time, but it did leave him wondering why she had called.

“So, umm, what's up? Have the police called or something?”

“Oh, no,” she said, laughing softly. “Not yet. We're all waiting to hear... well, anything, really. No, I was just going to see if you felt up to having dinner with the family in a few days. I just want to get us all together on, say, Thursday? It's just... well, you're almost all here again and I miss you.”

That wasn't quite as diplomatic as she usually was, but Taylor understood what she meant. She was trying, just a little bit, to play on his guilt for leaving, and it worked. 

“Yeah,” Taylor replied. “I've got nothing else to do but sit at home all day. Plus, I'm running out of all that food you gave me.”

She laughed softly again. “Okay, good. Five o'clock on Thursday, then. You can bring something if you want... you know it takes a lot to feed all of us. I wouldn't mind having to do a little less of the cooking.”

That was another subtle hint; she had relied on Taylor to do a good share of the cooking for years. He had taken to it pretty early on, far more than Isaac had before him, and it truly did take a _lot_ to feed their family. Having someone else around who enjoyed cooking almost as much as eating made things a lot easier. 

“Sure, I'll throw something together,” he replied, realizing that meant he would need to actually go shopping soon. Taylor supposed he could manage that; he would have to leave the house again someday, after all.

“Alright, sweetie. I'll see you, then.”

“Bye, mom,” Taylor replied.

No sooner had he hung up the phone than a knock came at the door. Taylor briefly wondered when he had become so popular, then trudged to the door to see who was bothering him before noon. It must have been important, judging by their insistent knock. When he reached the door and flung it open, he found himself face to face with a very flustered looking Shiloh.

“Shy? What's up?” He asked, leaning against the door frame.

“My car won't start.”

“You do realize I'm not a mechanic?” Taylor asked, smirking a little.

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, I do. I also realize that you have a car. And I have a doctor's appointment in less than an hour. So, I need you.”

“I'm sorry, can you repeat that?” Taylor didn't even care that that earned him a look which could have killed. It was totally worth it.

“I need you. To take me to the doctor,” Shiloh replied through gritted teeth. “Are you going to be a smug bastard about it or are you going to do it?”

“Both, probably,” Taylor replied. “Let me go get dressed. Won't take five minutes. You can wait inside.”

“Yeah, okay,” Shiloh replied, loosening her scarf slightly as she stepped into Taylor's house. 

He could tell she was nervous and impatient, so he hurried back to his bedroom and threw on the first vaguely presentable looking outfit he could find. The pants were a little wrinkled, but with his shirt tucked in and a belt added, he thought he looked alright. At least he had bothered to shower that day, he decided, then grabbed a pair of shoes and hurried back the hallway to find Shiloh again.

“Alright,” Taylor said, wiggling into his shoes and grabbing his keys, cell phone and wallet. “Let's go.”

Shiloh nodded and lead the way out of the house. Taylor locked the door as quickly as possible, then rushed to unlock and open the passenger door to his car before Shiloh could. He only smiled when she rolled her eyes at his display of chivalry. Someday, he thought, she would get tired of giving her eyes such a workout around him and just let him be nice to her without commenting on it every single time. That day had apparently not come yet.

Taylor turned the radio down as soon as they were out of the driveway and allowed Shiloh to give him directions to her doctor. It was a little ways from his house, but Taylor had a lead foot, so it didn't really matter; they still arrived in plenty of time for the appointment. 

Shiloh gave Taylor a sideways glance when he stepped out of the car and followed her into the building, but she didn't say anything until they were directly outside a door that bore the letters OBGYN. 

“Taylor,” Shiloh said, gripping his arm tightly. “You don't need to come inside, okay? It's just going to be awkward and kind of... well, personal. You can stay in the waiting room.”

He frowned. 

“Please,” Shiloh said. “I know, she's your baby, but... I'm just not ready for this. Maybe I'll feel differently next week. We'll see.”

It wasn't a complete concession, but it was enough for him. He gave her a small nod, then held the door open for her. Shiloh, surprisingly, didn't roll her eyes that time, but her mouth was set in a frown, so again, Taylor couldn't really call it a total win.

He trailed closely behind Shiloh as she made her way to the front desk and scribbled her name onto the sign in sheet. That didn't earn him another glare, at least. He stayed behind her again as she walked to one of the few empty seats in the waiting room, and he sat down in the one next to her. Again, no glare. At least, nothing worse than the grim look she had adopted as soon as he held the door open for her. As long as it wasn't getting worse, Taylor was happy enough.

Shiloh thumbed through an old copy of People while she waited, and Taylor tried to find a magazine to amuse himself with. He wasn't surprised to see that the only ones that weren't fashion magazines were focused on celebrities. He really didn't care to read any of that; right then, he wanted to be as far from his semi-celebrity status as possible. If he had been in a better mood and not fearing Shiloh's wrath, he might have asked the nurse at the front desk why they didn't seem to have any reading material for the husbands and boyfriends.

Although, he supposed, he was neither of those. Still, he was the father of Shiloh's baby and he was there with her. That ought to have counted for more than she seemed to think it did.

Taylor didn't have long to explore that particular train of thought before he was jarred back to the world by a voice on the PA system calling out Shiloh's name. He gave her a tiny smile, which he thought for a moment she might return, but it didn't seem to make it past her eyes to the rest of her face.

“I'll be back soon. Try not to flirt with any single mothers while I'm gone.”

At that, he couldn't resist taking a page out of her book and rolling his eyes as hard as they would possibly roll.

To his surprise, he began to feel sleepy only seconds after Shiloh disappeared behind the door where a nurse had stood to greet her. It shouldn't have been surprising, considering how little sleep he had gotten the night before, but the amount of coffee he had consumed and his general inability to sleep made it seem a little strange. Taylor didn't try to fight it, and it wasn't long before he drifted off into a surprisingly easy and restful sleep.

He didn't know how long he had slept when he felt someone nudging his shoulder. He blinked a few times to readjust to the light of the room and found Shiloh staring down at him, a smirk on her face.

“Alright, sleeping beauty,” she said. “You can take me home now.”

“That's it?” He asked, feeling rested but still a bit groggy and not totally himself again.

Shiloh nodded. “That's it. It's just a routine thing now that this bun's almost done baking.”

Taylor rolled his eyes at her metaphor, then wondered when the two of them had switched roles. He didn't much care for being the unamused one, but he did like that Shiloh seemed to be in a slightly better mood. How a doctor's appointment could have that effect on her, he wasn't quite sure, but he was happy for it.

Standing up, he risked offering his hand to her, and to his surprise, she accepted it. The two of them walked hand in hand out of the office. Taylor waited until they were alone in the building's hallway before speaking.

“So, what do they do in these routine things anyway?”

Shiloh shrugged. “Not much. It's basically just a checkup. Lots of questions about how I'm feeling, if the baby's moving a lot. Incidentally, she's kicking up a storm today. Little girly here is fidgety like her dad, I guess.”

“Oh, is she?” Taylor asked, grinning. _Like her dad._ He liked hearing those three simple words.

“I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be the one glowing right now, not you,” Shiloh replied, smirking. “Anyway, so after the basic checkup and all the questions, we talked about labor and delivery. All that fun stuff.”

“You've got to have a birth plan put together, right? Whether you want drugs or not and all that stuff?”

“Yeah,” Shiloh replied, then tilted her head to the side. “How are you so smart about babies?”

“One of seven, remember?” Taylor chuckled.

“Right,” Shiloh said. “So yeah, I'm working on the plan. I'm thinking drugs. All the drugs they'll give me. And just... the standard stuff, I guess.”

Taylor nodded. “You're tough, though. You'll be alright.”

“I guess,” Shiloh said, sighing and leaning against the side of Taylor's car. She looked like she was considering something, and Taylor thought it best not to press her. Finally, she glanced up at him again. “Look, they asked about... well, the father, and I was thinking... if you're determined to be involved, I guess you should be there.”

“Be there?” Taylor repeated.

“You know, when I give birth?” 

“Oh,” he replied, letting her words sink in. “ _Oh._ Yeah, that would be... yeah. Really.”

“Very eloquently put,” Shiloh said with a smirk and a tiny roll of her eyes.

That time, Taylor didn't even mind the eye roll. He just gave her a smirk of his own and said, “I have one condition, though.”

“I'm not naming her Jordan Taylor, even if both of those _are_ girl's names.”

“I'm going to ignore the fact that you just called the father of your child a girl,” Taylor replied. “The condition is that you come to a family dinner with me on Thursday. If you'll be home by five, anyway. It's fine if you can't, I guess.”

“I can,” she replied, giving him a little nod. “It's a deal.”


	10. Dinner Rolls

Taylor could hardly believe that Shiloh had agreed so easily to dinner with his family. It seemed so simple that he feared there had to be a catch. She was going to ask something more of him. He knew, though, that whatever she asked-–as long as it wasn't for him to stay away from her forever-–he would do it.

His mom hadn't told him what she planned on cooking for the family, so he wasn't entirely sure what he should bring. That left him with no option but to go shopping and buy everything that struck his fancy. Taylor justified the extravagant spending spree by reminding himself that he needed food for his house too and didn't know when he would feel like venturing outside again. 

Out of the bags and bags of food he brought home, he found the ingredients for a green bean casserole. He hadn't even meant to buy those particular items, but it seemed that he had. Green bean casserole was Charlotte's favorite, the dish that she always brought for big dinners with Taylor's family. Even though it pained him a little to think about it, he decided it was a fitting tribute to her to cook her favorite dish.

A few hours later, with the casserole tucked into a fancy container meant to keep it warm that had been a wedding shower present, Taylor rushed around his bedroom looking for his other shoe. He had showered will the casserole was in the oven and now he was nearly ready to leave. He even looked pretty presentable; his clothes were still a little wrinkled, which he was sure his mom would comment on, but he didn't think the dark circles under his eyes would stand out amongst his family right then.

He finally found the other shoe just as the doorbell rang. The sound itself was enough to soothe some of his fears; at least Shiloh hadn't backed out at the last possible second, Taylor thought. He stuffed his foot in the shoe and hurried to answer the door.

Taylor flung open the door and gave Shiloh a smile practically before he even saw that it really was her on the other side of the door. “Hey, Shy. Are you ready to go?”

“Mhm,” she replied, looking uncharacteristically sheepish.

“What's wrong?” Taylor asked, looking her up and down. She looked the best that she had looked since Taylor had returned to Tulsa. Not that she didn't normally look good, but her bright blue sweater dress gave her that pregnant glow that she had remarked on a few days before and it looked like she had even tried to curl her hair. Taylor couldn't help being happy that she had put in some effort into looking nice for his family.

“Nothing...” she said unconvincingly, shifting her weight around on her heels before finally pulling her hands out from behind her back and revealing a large Tupperware box. “I made dinner rolls.”

“You made dinner rolls?”

Shiloh nodded. “I am capable of cooking, you know. I mean, these were just frozen. But I... it's okay that I'm bringing something, right? I know how much it takes to feed the Hanson army.”

“Yeah,” Taylor replied, chuckling. “You're allowed to bring food. In fact, let me grab my casserole and we can hit the road.”

“I bring frozen rolls, and you bring a casserole. Way to outdo me.”

Taylor chuckled as he scurried into the kitchen and picked up the casserole container. He grabbed his car keys from the table and hurried back to the door where Shiloh still stood waiting.

“You didn't _have_ to bring anything, you know,” he said, guiding her toward his car and opening the door. “I'm just glad you're going. It'll be good, seeing... everyone.”

Taylor let out a sigh of relief that Shiloh didn't point out that one person would definitely be missing from the family dinner. He knew that she had to be thinking it, just as he was. He didn't think they would ever stop feeling like someone was missing; if it wasn't Zac, it was Charlotte. Their family would never really be whole again.

 _Their_ family, Taylor thought to himself. He liked the sound of that. 

Shiloh cranked the radio up and sang along softly as they drove across town to Taylor's parents' house. Taylor wondered when the last time she had been to their house was, but he didn't feel brave enough to ask. He had lots of questions that he wasn't brave enough to ask her. As they drove on and neared his parents' home, Taylor began to wonder if it had been a good idea to bring her.

The gate was open and even from the road Taylor could see that the driveway was packed full of cars. He recognized most of them-–Isaac and Mollie's, Jessica's boyfriend's-–but a few weren't so familiar. He supposed that was just a side effect of running away. Everyone's lives went on while he was gone. They didn't need him there to keep going.

He needed Zac, though. And he might never have him again.

“Tay?” Shiloh said. “What are we waiting on?”

Taylor glanced around and realized he had parked his car but still sat frozen in the driver's seat. Shiloh was eyeing him a little nervously, her lips twitching like she wasn't sure whether a smirk was appropriate or not.

“Nothing,” he replied. “Just thinking...”

“You might hurt yourself. Come on, now. Let's get this show started.”

There was a hint of cynicism to her voice, and Taylor wondered if Shiloh were just as nervous about dinner as he was. What were they going to say? Did everyone even know that she was pregnant? If so, did they know who the father was? He busied himself with helping her out of the car and tried to bite his tongue to keep from asking those questions. He would find out the answers soon enough.

He wanted to take Shiloh's hand, but he didn't know how she would take it, and they were both too bogged down with Tupperware, anyway. Taylor barely managed to raise his hand to ring the doorbell without splattering casserole all over the front steps. Only a few seconds passed before the door was flung open to reveal Taylor's mother. She looked surprised for a split second, but that surprise was soon replaced with a characteristically diplomatic smile.

“Hey, Mom,” Taylor said, scooting a little closer to Shiloh. “Sorry, I, umm... I forgot to call and tell you I invited Shiloh along. I hope that's okay.”

“Of course,” she replied, smiling and reaching a hand out to take the container of rolls from Shiloh. “It's great to see you, dear. It seems like it's been forever...”

“Yeah, months...” Shiloh trailed off, then plastered on a fake smile. “We brought food, though. I figured you might need some extra dinner rolls, so... well, it was the least I could do.”

“Oh, you didn't have to. But come on in.”

Taylor gave Shiloh a little smile and lead her into the house behind his mother. That hadn't been so bad, he decided. If only everyone were as diplomatic as his mom. He knew that wasn't the case, though. He could only hope that whatever was thrown their way, Shiloh took it well. 

Everyone was already gathered in the kitchen when the three of them walked in. Diana directed Taylor on where to sit the casserole, then raised her voice a little to be heard over the din. Taylor couldn't remember the last time their house had been so full, but he had a feeling it was just after Charlotte's funeral. He tried not to think about that as his mom led them all in a short prayer, then instructed everyone to help themselves to the food.

Shiloh stood back with Taylor and watched with amusement as his younger siblings and Isaac's two boys helped themselves to food, then headed off to the living room to eat around the television. He nudged her toward the table and gave her a small nod of permission.

The dinner table was awkwardly quiet as everyone dug into their food. With so many people in the family, even Diana's best attempts to teach everyone table manners hadn't really succeeded. Taylor couldn't remember a time, except perhaps right around Charlotte's death, when they had eaten a meal in silence. He missed the mindless chatter, but he didn't know how to possibly get it started. As it turned out, he didn't have to.

“So, Shiloh,” Jessica said, smiling innocently at her. “When are you due?”

Shiloh glanced at Taylor, then back at Jessica. “Umm, about five weeks.”

“You know, I've been worried about you, dear,” Diana said. “You haven't been around much lately, and I just didn't know how you and the baby were doing.”

“Zac obviously wasn't very concerned,” Isaac mumbled.

Shiloh's fork fell out of her hand and clattered noisily against her plate. It was the only sound in the room, as everyone turned to stare at Isaac. He might have intended for his remarks not to be heard by everyone, but Taylor doubted that. Did Isaac know? How could he?

Diana cleared her throat and gave Isaac something of a glare. “Yes, well, Shiloh has still been practically a part of the family for years, even if she and Zac aren't together.”

“But _why_ aren't she and Zac together, Mom? We all know it, even if she won't admit it.”

“You want me to admit it?” Shiloh asked, pushing her chair back to stand up. 

Taylor gaped at her and grasped her arm, but she shook him off and stood up anyway.

“Okay. I'll tell you. The baby is Taylor's. Are you all happy now?”

No one said a word as Shiloh scurried out of the room.


	11. Love

As soon as Shiloh disappeared around the corner, the questions began. Taylor shrugged them all off and ignored the way he could feel their eyes boring into him as he stood up to chase after Shiloh. He knew he would have to face them all eventually and explain himself, but at the moment, he was more concerned with calming Shiloh down.

He didn't want to admit it just yet, but his feelings for her were most definitely growing.

Taylor's first instinct was to check outside, assuming that Shiloh would be ready to leave. A quick check of the driveway showed it devoid of any people. Taylor stepped back inside and considered his next move. He had a feeling he knew where she might have gone, and although he dreaded looking there, he knew he had to.

He took the steps as slowly as possible, trying his best to delay the inevitable. He had walked this same path up the stairs and down the hall a million times, it seemed. After all, he had once lived in the room that he now saw a light shining out of. He almost wished he had been wrong about where Shiloh had chosen to hide. 

Pushing the door the rest of the way open, he saw that Shiloh was curled up-–as much as she could-–on Zac's bed. Despite the fact that neither he nor Zac had lived at home for several years, their mother had insisted on leaving their bedroom exactly as it had been when they were teenagers. The beds were still covered in coordinating blue and red plaid blankets, and the pale blue walls were decorated with posters and drawings. It practically looked lived in still, although Taylor knew better.

“Shy? You okay?”

“I really didn't mean to just blurt it out like that,” she said. Although her hair covered her face, Taylor could still hear the sniffle that punctuated the sentence.

“You wouldn't be you if you didn't just blurt things out,” Taylor said, hoping Shiloh would laugh rather than throw something at him. She didn't respond at all, so he took a few cautious steps into the room and sat down near her.

“It should have been your decision when to tell them,” Shiloh replied. “Hell, if you left it up to me, I'd probably _never_ tell them.”

“That's not very--”

“Rational. I know. It just seemed easier, though. Especially now that Zac's... well, there was a chance they'd never really _have_ to know. I would have been the only person who did.”

“What about me?” Taylor asked.

Shiloh finally glanced up at him, but only for a split second. “I didn't really intend to tell you, either. I didn't need you feeling sorry for me.”

“I don't,” Taylor replied, a little more harshly than he intended. “I mean, I just want you to be happy. As happy as any of us can be right now.”

“Yeah, whatever,” she said, sniffling.

“You really wouldn't have told me, though?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe. It wasn't something I thought I would even had to deal with, you know? Zac basically wanted nothing to do with me, you were in Chicago, and then Zac was just _gone_...”

“You do get how bad that sounds?”

“I'm not an idiot,” Shiloh said, trying to glare at Taylor but dissolving into tears in only seconds. “I miss him so much, Tay. I know... what happened between us, but... well, I don't think I even realized how much I loved Zac until after that. And then it was too late.”

Taylor was stunned, but it didn't stop him from reaching for Shiloh and pulling her into his arms. To his surprise and relief, she didn't resist. Instead, she seemed to completely collapse into his arms, sobbing against his shoulder. He wanted to say something that might make her feel better, but her admission of love for Zac had rendered him speechless. He was well aware of how much Zac loved Shiloh, but she had never, even during the times when they were actually together, seemed all that invested in him.

“Now I'll... probably never get to tell him,” Shiloh mumbled, the words barely even comprehensible at all.

“I'm sure he knows,” Taylor replied. 

He immediately hated himself for it. How _could_ Zac know? It was the sort of stupid platitude that people had spewed at him in the days and weeks following Charlotte's death. Their words had done absolutely nothing to comfort him, and he knew they wouldn't be of any comfort to Shiloh, either. 

She pulled back and frowned at him. “Yeah, nothing says love like carrying his brother's baby. Nothing at all.”

“It's not really that simple, is it?” Taylor asked. “I'm sorry... I don't know if he knows. I don't know _anything_ except that we've just gotta keep doing the best we can. I'm sick of running from everything, you know? It didn't help. I've got to face whatever happens, and so do you.”

Shiloh's frown deepened, but she nodded. 

“I'm not saying you haven't been handling things well. Just that... I don't know. I just want us to keep hanging in there, together. Whatever Zac knows or doesn't know... we'll deal with that when we have to. And we _will_ deal with it, okay? I'm not running, and you aren't either. You try to run, and I'll chase after you.”

“Why do you even care so much? What does it matter what I do?”

Taylor raised an eyebrow. “Besides the fact that you're having my baby?”

“Yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Besides that.”

Taylor shrugged. He hadn't wanted to truly have to face his growing feelings for her, but it seemed unavoidable. Not quite meeting Shiloh's eyes, he said, “I've always cared about you. You know that, right? I mean, you were always... close to Zac... and you were Charlotte's best friend. She loved you probably even more than she loved me. It's not like I ever disliked you or anything.”

“Could have fooled me a few times,” she said with a wry laugh.

“Yeah, well,” Taylor replied. “Things happen, you know? Just because I care about you doesn't mean you don't get under my skin and know all the ways to really piss me off.”

“True. But why do you care so much now, besides the baby?”

“Because...” Taylor said, taking a deep breath. “Because you're basically all I have left. Charlotte's gone, Zac's probably gone... you and that baby are my only chance now at doing things right, you know? At not fucking everything up and running away. I want to make things right, because _you_ deserve that. I don't know if I'll ever be happy, but I want you to be happy.”

“That isn't really a why.”

“It's the best I've got.”

Shiloh shrugged. “Good enough, I guess.”

“Can I ask you something now?” Taylor asked, leaning back against the wall. To his surprise, Shiloh scooted back to lean next to him. They weren't quite cuddling, but they were close to it.

“Sure.”

“Why did... why did you keep the baby?”

“I guess it was like you said. I couldn't make things right with Zac, I knew that. But I could maybe give this baby a good life. It was a fresh start, you know? Something I could do on my own, just to prove to myself that I could.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you're stubborn?”

Shiloh laughed loudly. “On practically a daily basis, in fact.”

“They're not wrong,” Taylor replied. “But it's one of your better qualities, if you ask me.”

“I'm not even going to ask what you think my worst qualities are, because I'd really like to be home before midnight and I have a feeling that's a _very_ long list.”

Taylor groaned. He didn't appreciate the reminder that they would, in fact, have to leave his old bedroom at some point. Knowing his luck, they wouldn't be able to make a quick getaway, either; they would have to face at least a portion of his family. 

“You know this room looks like something out of a magazine,” Shiloh said. “So does the baby's. I guess the decorating gene must run in the family, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Taylor said, laughing softly. “That reminds me... have you picked out a name?”

“Not really. We... well, before Zac knew the truth, he was so excited he started suggesting names. But I don't know.”

Taylor nodded, and swallowed around the lump that was forming in his throat. “What... umm, what were Zac's suggestions?”

“Stella for a girl. I don't know why, I guess he just liked it,” Shiloh said, then smirked a little. “And Jordan for a boy.”

“Jordan? Really?”

“That's what he said. He really loves you, you know. Doesn't mean he's always happy with you, but you're still his brother and he loves you.”

Taylor nodded, but he wasn't sure that he believed her. He had been miles and miles away while Zac was suffering, and he'd had no clue. No wonder Isaac seemed to hate him. If Zac hated him too, Taylor couldn't say that he didn't deserve it. 

“Sorry for pointing out the obvious,” Shiloh said, her voice surprisingly soft. 

Taylor leaned against her a little, trying to keep himself from crying. He could only imagine how much she would tease him for that. He just wanted to let everything out, though. To rid himself of all the emotions that kept trying to suffocate him. Rather than cry, though, he leaned down and pressed his lips to Shiloh's.

The move seemed to stun her so that she didn't move at all. That was better than pushing him away, Taylor decided. He let his lips linger on hers, not forceful or fast, just slowly exploring. He had little memory of the last time they had kissed, and he wanted to remember this one. More than that, he wanted it to last as long as possible, in case Shiloh came to her senses and never let it happen again.

Finally Shiloh seemed to wake up out of whatever daze she had been caught in. She placed her hands firmly on Taylor's shoulders and pushed him away-–not hard, but with enough force that he got the hint. Still, there was no anger in her eyes when she stared at him.

“Sorry,” Taylor said, nervously awaiting whatever she might say.

“It's fine,” she replied, glancing away quickly. “Come on. Let's go home.”

Taylor nodded and stood up. He held his hand out to her and was pleased when she accepted it. With her hand in his, he didn't feel so nervous about facing his family again. Whatever they said, he could handle it. He wasn't sure if it was love yet, but whatever it was he felt for Shiloh seemed to be strong enough to get him through anything.


	12. Together

Taylor wasn't sure how long he and Shiloh had sat upstairs, but by the time they walked back into the kitchen, it was clear that the dinner party had broken up. No one remained at the table, although a few plates still sat around as though they had just been recently abandoned. Diana stood at the sink, scrubbing other dishes and didn't appear to have seen or heard Taylor and Shiloh's approach.

“Hey, Mom,” Taylor said, raising his voice just a bit to be heard over the running water. “Umm, sorry about... that.”

Diana gave a tiny start at his voice, then turned off the water and took her time drying her hands. When she finally turned to face Taylor and Shiloh, she still looked every bit her usual calm and collected self.

“You know how dinners around here are, Taylor. With a family this big, it's unusual if someone _doesn't_ cause a scene.”

Taylor let out a soft chuckle, but Shiloh didn't seem so easily pacified. She chewed her lip nervously, not quite meeting Diana's eyes. Taylor pulled her a little closer to his side, hoping that whatever bond they had seemed to form, it hadn't been fleeting. He hoped that in some way, he could comfort her so that they could get through this and go home.

“I'm sorry for causing the scene, though,” Shiloh said. “It was obviously me, not Taylor. And I know I should have told you guys sooner, but well, I think you can see why I didn't.”

Diana nodded. “We all... assumed it wasn't Zac's. We didn't raise him to run out on his responsibilities like that.”

“And you certainly didn't raise Taylor that way either,” Shiloh added, smirking a little. “He's been very insistent about that.”

“Good for him,” Diana replied, smiling a little and taking a few steps toward Taylor and Shiloh. “I'm not saying you two need to get married or anything, but I do hope that you figure out a way to do what's best for the baby _and_ for both of you. You're adults. You can handle it.”

Shiloh let out a nervous laugh that nearly turned into another sob as it trailed off. Taylor wrapped his arm tighter around her and braced himself for another round of her waterworks. He feared that if she, the strongest girl he knew, kept crying, his own tears wouldn't be far behind.

“God, I'm sorry,” Shiloh said between sniffles. “It's just, I figured you would all hate me. And maybe the rest of them do, but it just... it means a lot that you don't. Really.”

“I could _never_ hate the mother of my grandchild,” Diana replied, reaching out to touch Shiloh's arm.

“Granddaughter,” Taylor corrected.

Diana's smile widened. “Granddaughter. Even better. I don't have one of those yet.”

“She's totally going to spoil her,” Taylor mock whispered to Shiloh. She giggled in spite of herself, and Diana paid Taylor no mind at all.

“I know this isn't going to be easy for the two of you, but, well, what _is_ easy for us right now? We'll get through it all somehow. We have to. You just worry about you, and pay no mind to what anyone else thinks.”

Taylor had a feeling that “anyone else” was mostly Isaac. Diana was the boss in their family, though. She was a kind ruler, but it was a given that she would eventually bring everyone around to her side. Taylor remembered that she had embraced Charlotte's weird friend Shiloh far sooner than the rest of them-–even himself. Perhaps his mother had been right about her all along.

With Shiloh's sobs now dying away, Diana scurried off to box up some of the leftovers for the two of them to take home. She wouldn't take no for an answer, and minutes later, Taylor and Shiloh were both carrying several containers of all variety of side dishes and desserts. Taylor wished that he could pile his stack so high that he didn't even have to look out, like an ostrich burying its head in the sand to avoid facing any of the rest of his family.

He didn't, yet somehow they still managed to avoid any awkward encounters with Isaac or anyone else. Once they were safely outside, Taylor breathed a long sigh of relief and he was pretty sure that he saw Shiloh do the same. 

Taylor helped Shiloh tuck all of their leftover food into the back seat of his car. He didn't know how they were going to divide it up once they got home. He didn't even like the idea that they would be parting ways once they arrived home. Maybe he could find some tactful way to ask her to spend the night. He didn't know how to ask without making it sound cheesy.

“So, are you just going to stand there, or were you planning on getting in and driving this thing?” Shiloh asked from the passenger seat.

“Sorry, I... zoned out, I guess,” Taylor replied, giving his head a little shake and climbing into the driver's seat of his car.

“I noticed,” she said. “Something on your mind, or did the hamster just fall off the wheel?”

“Just thinking about... us, I guess,” Taylor admitted, trying to focus on the driveway and then the road so that he wouldn't have to look at Shiloh and see just how much she was judging him.

“Oh. What about us?”

He sighed. “Well, I guess... is there an us? What does it mean? What are we going to do? All that stuff, you know?”

“I've been thinking about that too,” Shiloh admitted. 

“Come to any conclusions?” Taylor asked, risking a glance in her direction after he had eased his car onto the highway.

She shrugged. “Not really. I'm glad that your mom is so cool about it all, though. But... well, I don't know. You're kinda springing a lot on me, here.”

“And you didn't spring a lot on me?” Taylor asked, reaching across the car to give her stomach a playful poke.

Shiloh let out an exaggerated fake laugh. “Fair enough. I can't take this back, though. You... well, you could change your mind about any of this. About what you think you feel.”

“I don't think. I know. And I'm not changing my mind.”

He might not have said the word love, but it still seemed to render Shiloh speechless. Taylor realized that she might never love him that way, but he hoped that she could accept that he _was_ going to be a big part of her life – not just his daughter's. 

She didn't say a word, though, and Taylor figured it was best to let her be quiet. He didn't press her for an answer or even a reply at all. Instead, he drove back to his house in complete silence except for the soft sound of music from the radio. The music did nothing to soothe him and make him feel better, as it usually did. How could it, when there was a chance that he would never get to make music with both his brothers again? 

That was a line of thought that Taylor wished he could have avoided, but it was becoming more and more real with each passing day that Zac might not be returning. The police seemed to have no leads and no clue what had happened. It was as though Zac had just vanished, leaving nothing behind but a letter, and Taylor had even managed to lose that. It all seemed to be Taylor's fault. No one had come right out and blamed him for it, but they didn't need to. He blamed himself enough.

Finally, the torturously silent drive back to his house ended. He pulled into the driveway and shut the car off, then sighed. Under the weight of his heavy thoughts, Taylor barely even had the energy to get out and open the door for Shiloh or help her carry in whichever containers of food she decided to take, if any of them.

“So... is this little dinner date over?” Shiloh asked.

Taylor could feel that Shiloh was already putting her walls up again. If she was going to let him in at all, it wasn't going to be easy and he feared it would involve a lot of stepping forward and then backward. He didn't know how they would ever manage any true progress if she kept closing herself off when he thought things were going well.

“Yeah,” Taylor replied, sighing. “I guess it's over. Sorry it didn't go well. I don't know what I was thinking inviting you there. I should have known that it would be kind of a mess.”

“Yeah, you probably should have.”

“You know, if you really don't want anything from me... I don't know, maybe you have made it clear and I'm just stupid. But I feel like I'm getting mixed signals here.”

“I guess you are,” Shiloh replied. “And I'm sorry for that, but... I just don't know, okay? I don't know what I want from you right now. This isn't really what I bargained on.”

“It's not really what I expected either.”

“I know, I know,” Shiloh said. “I'm sorry. I just need some time, I guess.”

“Well, we've got plenty of that, don't we?” Taylor asked. 

He knew he sounded sarcastic, but it really was how he felt. His life felt like it was ending, but it hadn't. It would just go on and on, an endless parade of nothingness. Nothing except the hope of a little bit of happiness from Shiloh and his daughter. What else did he have left? Unless Zac came back... nothing.

But he had Shiloh and their baby. At least, he hoped he could count on _both_ of those being his, eventually.

“I guess we do,” Shiloh said, gripping the door handle. “Look, maybe tonight did kind of suck but thanks for inviting me. I know you meant well. You always do. It's probably the most frustrating thing about you.”

Taylor chuckled, even though he wasn't sure that was the appropriate reaction. Shiloh returned it with a small laugh of her own and Taylor couldn't stop himself from smiling.

“So, umm, do you want some of the leftovers?” He asked.

“Sure,” Shiloh said, returning Taylor's smile. 

She turned and slowly pulled herself out of the passenger seat. Taylor mentally berated himself for not rushing around to help her. As quickly as he could, he jumped up and rushed to the other side and opened the back door to pull out all the leftover food. 

“There's a little of everything, I think,” he said, surveying the stack of containers. “You can take it all if you want. I went shopping today, so I'm good for a while.”

“You look like you're wasting away,” Shiloh replied. “But I guess I need the food even more than you do, huh?”

Taylor gave her a little laugh, not feeling up to explaining how his appetite seemed to have disappeared along with Zac. Except for the few bites of his dinner that he had managed to choke down, he couldn't really remember the last thing he'd had that wasn't plain black coffee. Shiloh didn't need to know that, though.

“Thanks,” Shiloh said, taking a few of the containers from him and turning to walk across the yard to her apartment.

Taylor followed behind her with the rest of the food. Shiloh juggled her stack carefully as she unlocked the door, then turned back to face Taylor.

“I meant it when I said thanks for inviting me. I know you did mean well. And thanks for the food, too. Tell your mom I said thanks for... well, everything.”

Taylor nodded. “Yeah, I will. And you're welcome.”

Shiloh looked as though she were going to say something else. She glanced at the containers in her hand, then held out her other one to take the few Taylor still held. 

“You sure you can handle all of these?”

“Yeah, I'll be alright,” she replied, glancing off into the distance and not meeting Taylor's eyes.

“Alright. See you soon, I guess.”

Taylor wanted to hug her or kiss her or _something_ , but he didn't. With one last look at her, Taylor gave Shiloh a smile and walked away. He hoped she wasn't lying when she said she would be alright-–and not just when it came to juggling all that food.


	13. Music

The next day, Taylor woke up with the feeling that he needed to _do_ something. He remembered how he had begun to play some music a few days before, when he had found Charlotte's journal. That had completely distracted him and ruined his mood, but the idea of playing music had made him feel okay for a while. He knew that if Zac was really gone, he would never be able to make music the same way again, if at all, but maybe playing a little could improve his mood. It had always worked before when he was going through something bad. Somewhere, he had journals full of songs he had composed in the days and weeks after Charlotte's death.

He didn't want to play any of those, though. He wanted to create something new, just to assure himself that he was still capable of it.

After downing a few cups of coffee, Taylor felt awake and alert enough to tackle the task of making music. He sat down at his piano and cracked his knuckles a few times. In his mind, he could still hear Charlotte reminding him how bad that was for him and how it would someday give him arthritis so that he wouldn't be able to play. Surprisingly, the memory only made him smile. Maybe he was, finally, healing a little bit.

For a few minutes, Taylor could do nothing but just stare at the keys. The desire to play was bubbling up inside him, but he couldn't seem to get it to come to the surface. He thought of the songs the band had been slowly working on over the last few months before he had left. They were only small snippets and fragments that might later form real songs. Isaac and Zac were pushing to get another album soon so that it would, hopefully, distract Taylor from the depression he was sinking into. It hadn't really seemed to work.

Taylor had dozens of excuses for them as to why he didn't want to make any new music. It had only been a year since their last album, after all, and their tour had ended just a few months before Charlotte's death. It wasn't _time_ for a new album. They knew he was just trying to delay it, of course, and they wouldn't let him get away with it. 

Whenever they could, Zac or Isaac would try to ease Taylor subtly into it. Sometimes they would remind him of an old song they had never finished in the hopes of piquing some interest in him. It never worked. Other times, they would just begin playing something and hope that whatever it was would be contagious enough for Taylor to join in. That rarely seemed to work, either.

Taylor just _couldn't_. The music had left him along with Charlotte. He tried, on his own, to write about what he felt. He wrote page after page about losing her, but none of them were songs he wanted to share with the world. Those were his feelings and his alone. No one else could or would understand what he was feeling. While it felt good to write about it, a sort of catharsis, it didn't make him feel any more like going through the whole album process again like nothing in his life had changed.

Then he had left.

Taylor still couldn't help wondering how things might be different if he hadn't left. He had no clue why Zac was missing, but it felt a lot like his fault. If he had stayed, if he had worked on a new album in spite of his lack of desire to play music, maybe everything _would_ have been okay.

There was no way to know, Taylor realized. Whatever had happened was over and done. He couldn't go back in time and change it. But he could try to keep living, in spite of all the reasons he had not to.

With that thought in mind, he finally began to play. It wasn't anything old and familiar. It was a new melody that seemed to come to him by the second. He knew he should have been writing it down, but he didn't think he could truly duplicate it anyway. There was a certain emotion to it, a certain feeling unique to that moment, that he wasn't sure he would ever feel again. The song was a part of it, and it would have to stay that way. 

The song lasted for several minutes. Taylor played and played until his fingers began to ache and the song faded away. With it went any memory he might have had of the actual notes. It had felt like he was purging something from his body, and he wasn't sure if he wanted it back anyway. He was fine with letting the song fade off into the air and never return.

Just as the last echo of the song vanished, the phone began to ring.

Taylor didn't know who could possibly be calling him, especially relatively early in the morning, but he had a feeling that it wasn't going to be a pleasant phone call. He jumped up from the piano bench and hurried to pick up the nearest phone. As he did, he saw on the caller ID that it was the police department. That did nothing to relieve his worries.

“Hello?” 

“Is this Taylor Hanson?” 

“Yes, it is,” Taylor replied, recognizing the detective's voice.

“As I said before, I want to keep you up to date on the developments of the case. Your brother's disappearance, I mean. Have you spoken with any of your family today?”

Taylor didn't like the sound of any of that. He sank down onto the couch and attempted to brace himself for whatever news was coming. “N-no sir, I haven't.”

“I called your parents first, but I wanted to call you as well,” Detective Davies said.

“Okay,” Taylor replied, growing impatient with the detective's endless small talk. “What is it? What happened?”

“We found your brother's car.”

“His... car?” Taylor repeated, not entirely sure what that truly meant.

“Yes,” the detective replied. “In a town outside of St. Louis called Oakville. It was parked by the side of Mississippi, so...”

“You think he jumped,” Taylor replied, cutting Davies off. He could see all too clearly where this conversation was going.

“That is our theory, yes. We're working with the local police to begin searching later today. And as always, we'll keep you and your family updated.”

“Thanks,” Taylor said, thinking of nothing else appropriate to say.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Hanson,” the detective said.

Taylor wanted to say something else, but could think of nothing. He bid the detective goodbye and hung up his phone.

So that was it, he thought. Everything he had feared... the worst possible outcome... was really coming true. Zac was never coming back, and he still didn't understand why. That letter, wherever it had gone, was the last thing he had of his brother and he hadn't even read it. There would be no great revelation about why Zac had done it as there had been with Charlotte. He was just _gone_.

Taylor realized, with a sense of dread, that someone needed to tell Shiloh. She wasn't technically family, so she wouldn't be receiving a call from the police. Although he feared her reaction, and wasn't even sure that he could bring himself to say the words out loud, Taylor realized that he would have to be the one to deliver the news to her.


	14. Blame

Taylor stood at his window for a while and stared at Shiloh's front door. He had no clue how he could possibly break this news to her, but he knew that he had to. If he didn't soon, she would hear it somewhere else. What if she only found out from someone at her work, or worse yet, from the news? Taylor couldn't let that happen. 

When her front door opened and she walked outside, Taylor scrambled to put on a pair of shoes and dashed outside without even paying attention to whether or not the door closed behind him.

“Taylor, what the hell are you doing?” Shiloh asked, tilting her head to the side and staring at him. “Are you drunk?”

He glanced down and realized that he was still in his pajamas. He hadn't even managed to put on a coat and the front door to his house was indeed standing wide open. To Shiloh, he must have looked insane, and he had to admit, he kind of felt it, too.

“I... they...” He stuttered out.

“What is it?” Shiloh asked, glaring at him. “I'm going to be late for work if you don't spit out whatever it is that's apparently so important.”

“They found Zac's car.”

Shiloh blinked. “They _what_? Who did?”

“The police,” Tay said, slowly finding his voice again. “The detective just called me. Somewhere outside of St. Louis... Shy, they think... they think he killed himself. His car was by the side of the river.”

“No,” Shiloh said.

Taylor stared at her. “What... what do you mean _no_?”

“I mean no, I refuse to accept the idea that Zac killed himself,” Shiloh replied, glaring at Taylor. “Because if that's true, then the two people closest to me, the two people I love most, committed suicide. I really can't deal with that.”

“It's not like it's an epidemic,” Taylor replied. “You can't catch suicide.”

Shiloh only glared more. “That's not what I fucking meant. It's just... god, it's just fucked up. Do you even get it? How I blame myself every day for Charlotte's death? And now Zac, too?”

“And you think I haven't blamed myself for Charlotte killing herself? _Everyone_ blamed me for it, Shy! The police all but accused me of killing her, even though I wasn't even in the car.”

“Poor, pitiful Taylor,” Shiloh spat. “You didn't even know what she had been through!”

“Because she didn't tell me!” Taylor screeched. “How could I know? She could have talked to me about it. Hell, _you_ could have talked to me about it. But no, you kept it a secret. You're good at that, aren't you?”

Taylor didn't even know what he was saying anymore. His anger had taken over, and he was lashing out. Shiloh just had that effect on him sometimes, especially when she brought up the subject of Charlotte's death, as though it were some sort of competition to see which of them was more to blame and which of them was suffering more. He hated it and he hated Shiloh for leading the conversation that way again.

“And I suppose you think you know how much Zac was suffering, too? Do you even have any idea, Taylor, what it was like while you were gone?”

He blinked. Of course he knew that Zac was suffering. At least, he knew it now. How could he have known when he was gone, though? And how dare Shiloh imply that he had kept himself oblivious on purpose. 

“No,” Taylor replied. “I guess I don't. How the fuck could I, when you and Zac both kept this a secret from me? So no, I didn't know what was happening in his life, but that is not my fault.”

“Keep telling yourself that, Taylor. Just keep fucking telling yourself that.”

He didn't know what that was supposed to mean, but he knew that he didn't like it. As if he didn't blame himself enough for everything that had happened to Charlotte and to Zac, now it seemed that everyone else was blaming him all over again. It didn't matter that he thought they were right to accuse him. It only made him wish even more that _he_ was the one who was dead. Then no one would have to deal with how much he kept fucking everything up.

“You know what?” Shiloh asked. “I'm done with this conversation. I have work to do, something you wouldn't really understand. My bills don't get paid if I sit on my ass and do nothing but pity myself and collect royalty checks, you know.”

Taylor just gaped at her. “You know, I really thought I was doing you a favor by coming over here and giving you the news. I thought you'd want to hear it from me first.”

“Sure, of course. It's always nice to hear the bad news from the person who might as well be responsible for it.”

With that, Shiloh pushed past Taylor and climbed into her car. He could only stand there and stare at her as she peeled out of the driveway, obviously trying to put as much distance between them as she possibly could, as quickly as she possibly could.

Taylor suddenly realized that he was freezing. It was only the end of October, and it usually wasn't very cold in Tulsa that early in the year, but Taylor supposed that standing outside in his thin t-shirt and pajama pants probably wasn't a good idea in late autumn. Once Shiloh's car had disappeared around a curve and he could no longer watch her, he shuffled back into his house and slammed the door behind him.

That conversation hadn't gone how he had expected at all. He had expected Shiloh to be devastated, sure, but he had assumed that would come in the form of sadness, not anger. And especially not anger at him. What had he done, anyway, besides run away? 

And get Shiloh pregnant before leaving, he reminded himself.

Had that truly pushed Zac into such an awful depression that he felt the need to kill himself? It didn't make sense to Taylor. He still didn't truly understand what had pushed Charlotte to that breaking point, either, although reading her journals made it a little easier to understand.

It wasn't that Taylor didn't know what it felt like to see no way out and no way that your life could possibly improve. That was the reality he lived with everyday. But he lived that reality because so many of the people he loved had left him. He hadn't left Zac for good, and he hadn't left Charlotte at all.

So why had they both left him?

Even though he hating agreeing with Shiloh, he truly felt that he had only himself to blame. He hadn't been good enough for Charlotte and he had ruined Zac's relationship with Shiloh and then ran away. He was a coward, plain and simple. Even if he had stayed, he probably wouldn't have been strong enough to fix anything.

Shiloh seemed to understand what Zac had gone through far better than Taylor did. But how could she? According to her, they hadn't even spoken for months, not since he realized he wasn't the father of her baby. So how could she possibly understand what he was going through so well that she felt justified in rubbing it in Taylor's face? Taylor didn't think it made sense at all.

Then he remembered the letter.

It had disappeared the day that he first allowed Shiloh into his house. He had been certain that he had unpacked it, yet he hadn't been able to find it anywhere. She had taken a long time using his bathroom, he remembered. What if she had taken a detour and grabbed the letter? It seemed ridiculous to even consider, but then he remembered the way she had refused to let him clean her bedroom and had quickly swept up a bunch of papers into a desk drawer when she caught him looking.

She had to have Zac's letter, Taylor decided. And he knew how to break into her house and find it.


	15. The Letter

Taylor didn't care that he was still in his pajamas. He couldn't waste another minute without finding out the contents of Zac's letter. He was a little concerned that his loud fight with Shiloh might have attracted the attention of some of their neighbors, but ultimately he didn't really care what they thought of him. He was pretty sure that to all his neighbors, he was just the weird hermit who used to be a big celebrity. It didn't matter to Taylor at all if any of them saw him breaking into Shiloh's apartment again.

His mind made up, he walked up her steps and picked up the small fake rock that contained her extra key. She really should have moved it after she realized Taylor knew where it was hidden, but luckily for him, she hadn't. Pleased with Shiloh's forgetfulness, Taylor slipped the key from its hiding place and opened the door. 

He walked down the hallway, straight to her bedroom. He could only hope that she hadn't moved the letter from her desk. Taylor only barely managed to stop himself from peeking into the nursery. He didn't want to think about the baby right then or the fact that he had just had a huge fight with her mother. All that mattered in that moment was finding out what Zac had wanted to tell him.

When he walked into Shiloh's room, he could see that her desk was still a mess. He began shuffling through the mess of papers, magazines and other assorted things piled on top, but he didn't see the letter. Then he remembered how she had swept up some of the mess into a drawer. That was most likely where he would find Zac's letter. He opened the top drawer and pulled out the pile of papers in it, carrying them to her bed so that he could look through them more easily.

He had barely begun shuffling the envelopes when he saw the one with Zac's handwriting. It had been opened, he could see. Shiloh had read it. He wanted to be angry with her for that, and somewhere deep inside, he was. But more than that, he was just terrified to see what it said. This was the last piece of the puzzle, the last piece of his _brother_. Trembling a little, Taylor opened the envelope and removed the folded sheet of paper.

Despite a voice in the back of his head that said he didn't _really_ want to know what Zac had written, Taylor began to read.

 

_Dear Taylor,_

_You're probably wondering why I'm writing this in a letter instead of just calling. I guess I could ask myself the same thing. But I know if I called, you would just interrupt me, not allow me to say everything I want to say, or maybe not even answer at all. Of course, you could ignore this letter, and knowing you, you will. You're really good at ignoring things that you don't like, aren't you?_

_That was mean and I'm sorry. Actually, no, I'm not. You need to hear everything I'm going to say in this letter, whether you want to or not._

_You know, sometimes I wish I could just run away like you have. It would make things so much easier. Isn't your life easy now? Away from everyone, not having to think about us at all or worry what we're going through without you. The thing is, though, you leave all your problems behind when you leave. And that's what you want, I guess, but someone else has to shoulder the problems that you leave behind. Someone else has to suffer in your absence, and it seems that someone is me. I guess the only thing keeping me from running too is wondering who'll take over the suffering when I'm gone._

_The easiest answer to that is Shiloh, but god knows she's suffering enough anyway. She doesn't want me to tell you, but I don't really care. Congrats, Tay, you're going to be a father. Apparently you had sex with my girlfriend, if that's ever what she really was. I think everyone but me could see that she wasn't, but I fooled myself for years because I really loved her. I really did, and I guess I still do. I know you made fun of me for it, and I wish I would have listened. Maybe I could have prevented myself some of this pain if I'd realized years ago that she would never love me the way I love her._

_She's determined to raise the baby on her own, though. So you don't need to worry your pretty little head over that. As far as she's concerned, the kid doesn't have a father at all. Might as well not have one, I guess, since you skipped town pretty much as soon as the kid was conceived._

_I did the math myself and figured out I wasn't the dad. I'm pretty smart like that, you know. Shiloh wasn't even speaking to me the week that it must have happened. You know how she does that. I guess the silent treatment thing probably should have been my first hint that she really didn't like me all that much. But you know how stubborn I am. I hung on until she finally admitted to me that she'd had sex with you and she was 99% sure that you were the dad._

_You know I didn't even kick her out of our apartment then? I was perfectly willing to pretend the kid was mine, but she was having none of it. I'd wondered why she didn't seem very happy about having the baby, but it all made sense then. And then she left. I guess eventually everyone leaves, huh? One way or another._

_I thought I could at least still be there for her, though. But she didn't need me, just like you didn't need me, us, the band. I guess I'm just useless to everyone, aren't I? I couldn't hold the band together and keep you in Tulsa. I couldn't be enough for Shiloh to love, or even enough for her to pretend that I really was the father of her baby. I couldn't be anything at all that she wanted._

_What am I even doing, then, if no one needs me? Every day I ask myself that and I never have an answer. I can't help thinking you must feel the same way. How do you deal with it? Is running away the only solution, or does it stick with you no matter how far you run? If it does... then I guess there really is no good solution. Just one. Please tell me that isn't the answer._

_And please come back._

_Love, Zac_

  

By the time he finished reading the letter, tears were rolling down Taylor's face. The last few words were barely clear enough for him to even read through his tears. They dropped heavily onto the page, threatening to wash Zac's words away entirely.

Zac _had_ accused him, but more than that, he had just wanted answers. Answers that Taylor didn't think he could have given him, but he wished he'd tried. He wished he hadn't been such a coward. If he could have at least made Zac feel less useless, less alone, maybe Zac wouldn't have come to the final conclusion that there was no way out of what he felt. 

Taylor didn't hear the door open or Shiloh's footsteps coming down the hall. When the bedroom door swung open, he nearly jumped off the bed in surprise.

“Again?!” Shiloh screeched. “What the _fuck_ are you doing?”

“What the fuck are _you_ doing?” Taylor countered. “You... you stole this letter.”

“I was having contractions,” she replied. “It's not a big deal, it happens sometimes when you're this far long. They've stopped for now, but they sent me home anyway. And _you_ broke into my house.”

“To get back what you stole from me. Zac's letter to _me,_ ” Taylor replied. 

“At least he wrote you a letter,” Shiloh said, her voice cracking.

Taylor couldn't stop himself from jumping up and pulling her into his arms. She dissolved into sobs in his arms and he walked them back to the bed together, not saying a word, just letting her cry onto his shoulder.

“I... I know I shouldn't have,” Shiloh squeaked out between sniffles. “But I saw it there and I just... I thought, this might be the last thing Zac ever wrote. The last little piece of him that I'll ever have. So I took it.”

Taylor nodded. “That... I can understand that, I guess. So you read it?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “I should have known how much he was hurting, but you know how he is. Always smiling. He never lets his emotions show.”

“I should have known, too,” Taylor said. “But as easy as it is to do, it's not really helping us to dwell, is it?”

“I guess not,” Shiloh replied, sounding unconvinced. “We both failed him, didn't we?”

Taylor sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, we did. Can we try not to fail each other, too?”

Shiloh slowly nodded. “Yeah... yeah, I think we can try.”


	16. Goodbyes

Somehow, despite her stubbornness, Taylor had convinced Shiloh to stay home from work the next day. Her contractions hadn't returned, she kept assuring him, but it was obvious to him that she didn't feel well. Taking one day off wouldn't kill her.

He had to admit that he wasn't surprised that, as he stood by the window sipping his coffee, he saw her walking outside, fully dressed, at the time she normally left for work. What did surprise him was that she didn't walk to her car. Instead, she cut across his yard and up his driveway. 

Taylor scrambled to move away from the window before she could see him spying on her. He splashed a little coffee out of his cup as he hurried to answer the ringing doorbell. He swung the door open and, not surprisingly, found himself face to face with Shiloh.

“I thought you weren't going to work today,” he said.

“I'm not,” she replied. “Even though I'm _fine_. When was the last time you visited Charlotte's grave?”

Taylor blinked at the way she had effortlessly switched subjects and took another sip of coffee in the hopes of speeding his mind up enough to keep up with Shiloh's pace. 

“Umm, I guess at her funeral,” he admitted.

Shiloh nodded. “That's what I figured. Me too. I think we should go today.”

“Today?”

“I'm free, you're free, and we need to do this. We need to say goodbye to her, Tay. We need this to be _over_.”

He couldn't really argue with that. He let Shiloh into the living room to wait while he finished his coffee, showered and got dressed. Shiloh might have been right, Taylor decided, but that didn't mean he wasn't a little scared of following through with her plan. Scared wasn't really the right word, though. What grown man was actually _scared_ of a cemetery?

He _was_ ashamed, though. Ashamed that in a year, he hadn't been to her grave even once. Ashamed that he had never said goodbye to Charlotte because he hated to admit she was really gone. Ashamed that his denial of reality had been so complete that he'd had to run away several hundred miles just to put some distance between himself and the truth. Just as Zac had suggested in his letter, the distance didn't fix anything. Running didn't fix it.

It was time to quit running, he supposed. It was time to really accept that his fiance was gone and say goodbye to her.

They drove to the cemetery in silence. Taylor knew the way; it was the same place where his grandparents had been laid to rest years before. When he was little, he had been forced to come along with his mother every year as she laid beautiful, homemade floral arrangements on their graves. Eventually, his career kept him away too often to always assist her, and he couldn't even remember the last time he had been there-–aside from Charlotte's funeral, that is.

When he pulled into the parking lot and shut off his car, the silence was deafening. Taylor stubbornly didn't want to step out of his car at all, and it seemed that Shiloh felt the same. 

“Rock, paper, scissors?” Taylor finally asked.

“Only you,” Shiloh replied, shaking her head, but holding out her fist nonetheless.

She lost, and with a long sigh, she stepped out of the car and began to walk into the cemetery. Taylor watched her disappear behind the gate and make her way to the fancy marble headstone that marked Charlotte's final home. It wasn't the home she was supposed to have, but Taylor had spared no expense on it, in spite of her parents' protests that he shouldn't have been the one to pay for it. He didn't care. It was the last thing he ever got to do for her. 

Taylor realized now just how meaningless of a gesture it was. He supposed this was the sort of shallowness that Shiloh constantly objected to. Throwing money at his problems wouldn't fix them, he knew, but he hadn't realized just how true it was until that moment.

A few minutes later, Shiloh returned to the car. She slumped down in the passenger seat and turned her head away from Taylor to hide her tears.

“Your turn,” she said, the words partially obscured by a sniffle.

Taylor didn't say a word. He just gave her a nod and stepped out of his car. Despite only having been to her grave once, he seemed to have memorized the way there. His feet carried him easily through the rows until he found himself in front of the large headstone that he realized truly was too much. What had he been thinking, Taylor wondered. He supposed he _hadn't._

There were flowers on top of the headstone and in the small vases to either side of it. Pink lilies; Charlotte's favorite. They were weathered, but Taylor was sure they had been his mother's handiwork that spring. It was strange to think how everyone else's lives had just gone on, even when he wasn't there. Taylor knew, rationally, that they wouldn't stop living just because he was gone. It was like coming back from the dead, though, to see just how everything had changed and stayed the same in his absence.

After a moment, he knelt down and cleared his throat.

“Charlotte, I... well, I don't know if you can hear me at all, but you know how much I like to talk. So if I'm going to say goodbye to you, I think I need to really _say_ it,” Taylor began. “The truth is, though, I still don't want to say it at all. I don't want to you to be gone. I'm not mad at you, though. I think maybe I finally understand why you did it. I just wish you could have talked to me about it. I know I couldn't have fixed it, but I could have tried to help. Maybe together we could have saved you. I don't know. I guess it doesn't do any of us any good to think about things like that. You dwell on this stuff and try to figure out how you could have done it differently and you just get more and more convinced that there's no way to go on.”

Taylor had to pause there, feeling the tears welling up as he thought about Zac.

“I know what it feels like now, you know. To think there's no way you can possibly go on. But I also know that everyone else has to, even if I decide not to. I'm not... I'm not saying you didn't know that. Maybe you thought you were helping us by getting yourself out of the way. God knows that's what I thought I was doing when I ran off to Chicago. I was wrong, though. And now I've got a chance to fix things. I couldn't fix you, and I was too late to fix Zac, but... well, I can be there for Shiloh and our baby. And I can live my own life again. You'd want me to do that, wouldn't you? You wouldn't want me to just stop because you're gone. I think that's why you left, in a way. I think you thought you were saving me from you. Now it's time for me to save me from myself. And I don't know... I don't know if I would have ever learned that lesson if this hadn't all happened. I think I could have been a good husband to you, and a good father if... if we had had kids. But I'll never know. I've just to try to be as good as I can now.”

He paused again and wiped away a few more tears. They had really started to flow and with them, his breath was hitching and catching in his throat. He played with a few blades of grass while he tried to breath a little more slowly so that he could speak again.

“I know it probably seems like I'm moving on. This... this thing with Shiloh, and the baby, and everything. But I'm always going to love you, Char. Always. I think... I think Shiloh is the only thing of you I really have left. My last connection to you. And I'm _her_ last connection to you. And to Zac. God, I fucked things up for him, too. And I can never fix that. But I can go on. I can make sure that everyone I still have knows how much I love them. And I hope that, wherever you are, you know that, too. Goodbye, Charlotte.”

Taylor didn't even try to hide his tears as he walked back to his car and climbed into the driver's seat. Shiloh offered him a crumpled tissue from her purse and he accepted it gratefully. After attempting to dry his face a little, he glanced over at her.

“You feel better now?”

“No,” Shiloh replied. “You?”

“Not really.”

She nodded. “I think we will, though. I think we'll be okay.”

“Yeah, me too,” Taylor replied.

It was hard to really see how, but he could feel it. They were together, and they were stronger than they had any right to be. They would be okay.


	17. Finally

It took the police two days to locate Zac's body. Taylor knew it was only a matter of time; there was no hope left he would suddenly appear somewhere, still alive. This time, the phone call came from his mother, not the police detective. She barely even said a word, but through her strangled sobs, Taylor knew what she was trying to tell him.

Zac was gone. His suffering had ended, and Taylor's was entering a new phase.

Taylor spent the majority of the next few days at his parents' house, Shiloh by his side despite her trepidation and Isaac's sideways stares. They ate the piles and piles of food delivered by friends and relatives and sorted through all of the letters from fans. Diana refused to let Taylor throw any of them away, but he also couldn't bring himself to read them. When the mail came in, he and Shiloh sorted out the junk and bills from the cards and letters from fans and stuffed the latter into boxes that would probably never be opened again. The full boxes were carried out to the studio that Taylor supposed would never be used again, either.

He refused to assist in the funeral planning. He had no suggestions and had realized that all of that stuff truly didn't matter anyway. It was an outward expression of how they all felt about Zac, but ultimately, Taylor knew that what he did with his life now that Zac was gone could be a more fitting legacy to him than any fancy coffin and floral arrangement. Actions meant so much more than any of that.

Charlotte's funeral had been small and private. To everyone's surprise, the majority of Taylor's fans had seen fit to leave him alone and let him mourn her in peace. They held the funeral in her family's small church and then the few of them who loved her most – his family, hers and Shiloh – gathered at the cemetery to lay her to rest.

Zac's funeral, he knew, would be much, much larger.

The funeral home was large and more than capable, but still each day, they were crowds of fans gathered outside their doors. Taylor felt silly, his head down in the back of a long limousine with dark tinted windows. It reminded him of all the times when they were younger, and Zac had practically tried to crawl under the limo seats to hide from the hoards of screaming girls outside. Until that moment, Taylor had never really wondered just what effect their fame might have had on them. Would anything have been different if they hadn't grown up in the public eye? He didn't know, and he didn't want to think about it.

The building was packed, but Taylor was certain that he knew every person inside by name. The fans stayed outside, holding their own vigil. It seemed like something out of a movie, and Taylor could barely even process a single word that was said. Everyone who spoke to him seemed to be speaking gibberish and all of the sermons and speeches were equally incomprehensible to him. No one said any of what he was really feeling, but he supposed that some of those feelings weren't really appropriate for a funeral.

He hadn't wanted to give a speech of his own, but Diana had insisted that he and Shiloh both say a few words. She was the sort of person you couldn't say no to even at the best of times. He agreed to go after Isaac, and Shiloh after him. When his turn came, it occurred to him that he hadn't actually planned a single thing he was going to say, but he stood and walked to the pulpit anyway. He looked directly at Shiloh as he spoke.

“It's no secret that out of all my brothers and sisters, Zac was the one I was always closest to. It wasn't playing favorites; we just had the most in common, I guess. We invented all sorts of crazy games together when we were little, we wrote some of our best songs together... we even fell in love with best friends.” He paused there to give Shiloh a small smile before continuing. “That doesn't mean we always got along or we always understood each other, though. The last year was really difficult for both of us, for different but... kind of similar reasons. We both dealt with our pain in similar but different ways. I'll never truly understand why he did what he did, but it was his choice. Zac was a stubborn guy–-another one of those things he and I had in common. And I'm going to stubbornly go on loving him and living a life I hope he would be proud of, even if he's not here to see it.”

Taylor didn't know if he'd said the right things, but Shiloh gave him a tiny smile and that was good enough for him. He stepped back and made his way back to the pew where she sat. He sat down next to her and gave her hand a squeeze.

“You can do it,” he whispered to her.

Shiloh didn't look convinced, but she nodded and stood up to take her place at the pulpit.

“I really didn't prepare anything to say today. I didn't think anyone would really want me to, but Diana insisted and, well, I think we all know where Taylor and Zac got their stubbornness from,” Shiloh paused there and gave a little smirk. A few people laughed, and then she cleared her throat and continued. “I loved Zac. Well, I still do, and I guess I always will. I don't know how many people knew that. I'm not even sure that Zac knew, but I hope he did. He was such an optimist, though. I guess that's why... this... surprises me so much. Zac saw what he wanted to see. What made him happy. That doesn't mean he was always happy, though. I think he just bottled up all the things that hurt him, pretending they didn't exist, until it just overflowed and he couldn't live with it all anymore. I guess we all have our breaking point. But even if Zac wasn't always as happy as he seemed, he made sure that everyone who knew him was. He only wanted the best for us all. And he wouldn't want us to sit around and feel sorry for him or ourselves now. I know it's tough not to do that. Believe me, I do. Zac would want us to go on and be happy, and figure out how to live with our problems. I know I'm going to try... for him.”

The rest of the funeral was just as much a blur to Taylor as it had been before he gave his speech. He couldn't even remember a word that his parents, brothers and sisters said. He didn't register anything that their friends and employees said. Ashley showed a short video he had edited together from the footage he shot of the boys over the years, and Taylor barely remembered when any of it had happened. His entire life before that day was just a blur – a blur that seemed to have happened to someone else entirely.

When everything had been said and done, Taylor took his place along with his other two brothers, Ashley and a few other friends. There were more than enough of them to lift the coffin, but still each one looked like they were going to crumble under the burden. The casket had remained closed throughout the funeral, and Taylor was fine with that. He didn't need to see Zac one last time to know that he was really gone. 

Fans had gathered at the cemetery even before the long line of limousines arrived. That didn't surprise Taylor at all. A thin drizzle began as the preacher spoke, but still the fans remained by the cemetery gates. He wondered if they could hear what was being said or even see Zac's coffin from where they stood. A year prior, Taylor would have been angry at them for being there, as though they had any right to see such a private moment. Now, though, he understood that they needed it. They needed to grieve him, too, in whatever way worked for them.

It was strange, Taylor thought, to feel the anger and bitterness draining out of himself after so long. He was glad to see it go, though. As they lay Zac to rest, he held Shiloh's hand tightly and she let him.

When it was over, he wrapped his arm around her and she around him, and they walked back toward the cemetery gates together. Still the crowds of fans stood there. Some had umbrellas, but those who didn't hardly seemed to notice the difference. Their reverent silence seemed to have been washed away by the rain. Several fans called out to Taylor and his family, saying various sentiments and well wishes. He heard one or two comments about Shiloh, and she tensed at his side at the sound of her name.

“Shiloh,” someone called out. “Weren't you and Zac together?”

“We were,” she said simply. 

“Is she dating Taylor now?” Another fan asked no one in particular.

Shiloh gritted her teeth and walked on, ignoring the questions entirely. Taylor remained by her side, still holding her tightly and struggling to keep his small umbrella over both of their heads. Once they were safely inside the limo, he spoke.

“I'm sorry, Shy. We couldn't keep them away completely, and they were pretty respectful up to that point.”

“It's fine,” she replied. “People are going to ask that for a long time, you know. They're going to want to know.”

Taylor nodded. “So what do we tell them?”

“The truth I guess,” she replied. “That, yes, we are together.”

“Are we?” Taylor asked.

Shiloh gave him a little smirk. “Is that a problem?”

“No,” Taylor replied. “Not at all.”

Taylor didn't know for sure what Zac would think of that, his ex-girlfriend dating his brother, but he hoped that Zac would understand. He had spoken the truth earlier. In spite of his mistakes, he wanted to make Zac proud.


	18. Fleeting

The days and weeks following Zac's funeral felt all too familiar to Taylor. There were so many things that had to be done after a death, things that Taylor had gone through only a little over a year prior. He knew this routine. He knew about all the phone calls and letters to make sure all the appropriate people and agencies were aware of Zac's passing. He knew about the piles and piles of fanmail that would inevitably arrive well into the future. 

The last step, which they had all delayed as long as possible, was cleaning out Zac's apartment. It seemed that no one in the family wanted to do it. Isaac claimed he wouldn't know what to do with Zac's things and Diana kept promising she would do it, then coming up with any number of excuses.

After two weeks, Taylor finally accepted that he would have to be the one to do it. It felt like a fitting sort of penance, he decided. Shiloh agreed and offered to accompany him. The next day that she had free of work, she joined him and they drove to the apartment she had shared with Zac for two years.

They had moved in together during her senior year of college, the same year that Taylor proposed to Charlotte. Taylor always thought it was strange, since they weren't even dating at the time. For a while, Zac even had another girlfriend who spent a few nights a week in the apartment, but that didn't last very long. It had been a convenient arrangement, Shiloh explained. They were always going to be best friends, whether they were together or not, and she needed a place to live after Charlotte moved in with Taylor.

The apartment was plain and sparsely decorated. It reminded Taylor of how Shiloh hardly seemed to exist in her current apartment; he supposed that was something she and Zac had in common. Neither of them felt the need to put down roots and really settle somewhere, even in a place they would most likely be staying for years. The only distinguishing feature in Zac's entire apartment was the one wall he was allowed to paint. Even before setting foot in the apartment again, Taylor could remember what it looked like. He wasn't surprised to see that Zac had added to the mural, though. 

It had begun with the deep shade of blue that he and Shiloh had picked and had approved by the landlord. Then Zac began sketching various scenes-–cityscapes and animals and musical instruments-–in pen, then later in acrylic paint. Shiloh had added a few touches here and there of her own. Over the years, it had taken on a life of its own, even when the rest of the apartment was bare white and only the minimal things needed for daily life.

“I'll take Zac's room, if you want to stay in here,” Shiloh said, giving Taylor a slight nudge. “Just give me a few of those boxes and I'll get started.”

Taylor nodded and handed over a few of the flat cardboard boxes they had picked up from an office supply store on their drive over. He could have stood and stared at the mural forever, but he knew he had to get to work. He pulled a marker from behind his ear where he'd stuck it for safekeeping and labeled the first box “DVDs.” He figured that-–the big floor to ceiling shelf of movies, games and so on-–was a good enough place to start.

He packed up box after box of DVDs and games. Taylor wasn't surprised at all by how varied and extensive Zac's collection was; Zac was by far the biggest nerd of the three of them. Taylor had no doubt that, especially since the band had quit touring, Zac had completed every single game on the shelf and watched every movie. It took nearly all of the boxes he had to pack them all and he realized he would have to make a trip down to his car for more boxes before he was finished with the living room. 

The bottom shelf was far less organized than the others, and seemed to be piled full of all manner of items. Taylor sat down in the floor to examine it and found that among the empty CD boxes and things were several VHS tapes. Each one was hand labeled in what he recognized as his father's handwriting. The dates varied, but Taylor could tell that each one came from their earliest tours, when their parents had insisted on documenting everything.

Even in the beginning, at their young age, they had a sense that the fame couldn't possibly last forever. It seemed like such a fickle, fleeting thing that could be ripped away from them at any moment. There had been times, especially during the dark years with Island Def Jam, that it seemed only mere days remained before their time was up. But in those early years, they had been especially careful to film everything, to document it all, as if they needed the extra proof that it really was happening.

Taylor wondered when Zac had liberated these tapes from their archives in the studio. They seemed so random that Taylor was sure that Zac had just walked in, grabbed the first ones he touched, and brought them home. He looked up and saw that there was a VHS player plugged in; it looked old and he could see the lines of Zac's fingertips brushing off the dust before, no doubt, playing one of these homemade Hanson documentaries. He couldn't stop himself from brushing his own fingertips over the buttons; something about knowing how recently Zac must have been in that very spot shook him to the core.

Their fame would fade now, Taylor supposed. He had spent the last year feeling washed up, anyway, certain that he would never want to make music again. Now he supposed that he _couldn't_. Sure, they could bring in another drummer, the way they'd brought in various bass and rhythm guitar players over the years. But that would be an insult to Zac. Taylor didn't think he could stomach the sight of someone else behind the drumset, someone else's hand in his during the final bow, someone's pale imitation of Zac's perfect harmony. 

Still, even after a year of no music, their fans had turned out in droves to mourn Zac. Of course they would be sad, but Taylor wondered how long they would stick around now that it was really over. Would they still consider themselves Hanson fans? Would anyone _care_ who Isaac and Taylor were now? 

They were shallow thoughts, Taylor knew. Those things didn't really matter. It wasn't the fame that had ever truly mattered. It was only the ability to keep making music that mattered; that was the thing they truly feared having ripped away from them. Now it truly was gone, and Taylor wasn't sure that he even _knew_ who he was anymore.

Taylor couldn't stop himself. He grabbed a tape labeled _August 2000_ and popped it into the VHS player. From the floor, he turned on the television and pressed play, then stared up at the screen to see what that particular tape might reveal.

It hadn't been rewound from whenever it was last played, Taylor assumed, from the way it abruptly began in the middle of a tour of their bus, narrated by his father. It wasn't really any different from the bus they'd had for the previous tour, but nevertheless, their dad described it all in such detail that you'd think he had never set foot on a tour bus before. By that year, things were only just barely beginning to lose their luster.

He pushed back the curtain to the back lounge and Taylor wasn't surprised to see Zac sitting there. Still, it took his breathe away to see his younger brother there, looking even younger than Taylor's most recent memories of him. His face was almost completely hidden by his dirty hair and he was engrossed in a book that Taylor couldn't see the name of. When Zac finally acknowledged the camera with half a smile, then held up his book, Taylor wasn't surprised to see that it was The Hobbit. Even then, it was so worn that the cover was barely hanging on. Taylor wondered just how many times over the years that Zac had read and reread that entire series.

If anyone asked, Zac would tell them his favorite character was Gandalf, but Taylor knew it was really Sam. He'd jokingly compared Taylor to Frodo in the movies, complaining that Elijah Wood was too pretty for the role. Taylor wondered if he hadn't really been trying to compare the two of them to Sam and Frodo. In the end, Taylor wasn't sure that either of them had been strong enough to carry the other's burden, but it was his job and his job alone, whether he wanted it or not. And for Zac, he would do it.

“Taylor?”

He jumped up and scrambled to turn off the tape, embarrassed to let Shiloh see him being sentimental and unproductive. He wasn't sure how she would feel about seeing Zac on the screen, anyway. 

“Yeah?” He called out, pulling the tape out and quickly tossing into in a box.

“I think... I think my water just broke.”


	19. Labor

Taylor rushed into Zac's bedroom and found Shiloh sitting on the bare mattress, a slightly perplexed expression on her face. She had broken out into a sweat, it seemed, and he didn't know if that was from the exertion of packing or from what else her body was going through. Either way, he suddenly felt very guilty for even making her work at all.

“I thought you weren't due until Friday,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” she replied, snarling. “Did you really expect your child to do _anything_ that was expected of them?”

Taylor laughed in spite of his nervousness. He hurried to the bed and wrapped his arm around Shiloh, ignoring the way she attempted to shrug him off. After a few seconds, she quit fighting and let him help her up off the bed and guide her back through the apartment. They paused only for a moment by the door so that Taylor could grab her purse. 

It occurred to Taylor that they hadn't really discussed how this was going to happen. She had seemed so dismissive of the idea of a birth plan, aside from agreeing that he could be there if he wanted. Other than that, Taylor had no clue what to expect. He settled Shiloh into the passenger seat of his car and was backing out of the parking lot before it even occurred to ask him what hospital she wanted him to take her to.

He was definitely in over his head, but he didn't care. He was going to be a father in a matter of hours. Nothing else but Shiloh and that baby girl mattered.

They arrived at the hospital in what Taylor was pretty sure was record time, thanks to his lead foot. Every time Shiloh whimpered or starting breathing heavier, he sped up just a little bit more. He pulled right up to the front of the hospital, not caring if he was actually allowed, and had barely even put his car into park before springing out and running to the other side to help Shiloh out of her seat.

“You can make it inside, right? While I go park?”

She rolled her eyes. “I'm having a baby, Tay. That's all. I'm not injured. Last time I checked, my legs still worked just fine.”

“And so does your bad attitude,” Taylor remarked, smirking. He kissed her forehead. “I'll be back as soon as I find a place to park.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” she replied, but gave him a tiny smile before waddling toward the hospital door.

It took Taylor far longer than he would have liked to find a parking spot, and once he did, he had a long walk back to the hospital doors. He walked inside and saw that Shiloh was sitting in a chair filling out some sort of forms while also cradling her cell phone between her face and her shoulder. He approached her quickly, but quietly, since he didn't know who she was talking to.

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Yes... Taylor's here. I'll... I'll have him call you and keep you updated, okay?”

Taylor blinked, but didn't speak a word. He waited as patiently as he possibly could while she said goodbye to whoever was on the other end of the line. After a moment, she slid her phone back into her purse and glanced sheepishly at Taylor.

“That was my mom,” she said. “She's umm... well, she wanted to drive up from Texas, but I told her that was ridiculous. You'll call her, right?”

Taylor nodded. He hadn't even thought about what Shiloh's family would think of everything that was happening. She didn't really have a lot of family besides her mother, who Taylor vaguely recalled having met a few times, but she lived several hours away in Texas. Shiloh's family was a lot different from his; whereas his was large and constantly in contact with each other, even if they didn't always get along, her was small and seemed to get along better if they didn't talk all that often. Taylor didn't understand it at all, but he was glad, at least, that she was talking to her mother.

“So,” Taylor said, clearing his throat. “What's the plan? I mean, what's going on?”

“Well, I have to finish filling these forms out so that I'm officially checked in. Then they'll take me back and starting monitoring my--” Shiloh paused and winced. “Oww. Those. My contractions. And they're calling in my doctor, too, so we can be ready to really get this show on the road.”

“And me? What about me?”

Shiloh shrugged. “Whatever you want. You can come back and stay with me as long as you want, or you can stay out here the whole time. I can't guarantee that I, or the whole thing, will be very pleasant, so... you may want to steer clear.”

Taylor chuckled. “How about this. How about I go back there for now, and if I want to step out, I will?”

“Yeah, okay,” she replied. “Just... wait until they get me situated and everything? I'll tell the nurse to come get you then.”

Taylor wasn't totally sure he trusted Shiloh to do as she said, but he figured it was best not to argue with her at that particular moment. He settled back into his seat and tried not to look horribly impatient as she finished filling out her forms and took them up to the front desk. Shiloh only offered him a tiny smile as a nurse helped her into a wheelchair and carted her off down the hallway and out of sight.

It was exactly seventeen minutes before the nurse came back into the waiting room to get Taylor. Shiloh looked roughly the same, despite being in a hospital bed in a pair of pink scrubs. She looked totally unimpressed by her surroundings, but Taylor was pretty sure that was her natural expression. 

“I'm fine,” she said, before Taylor even had a chance to ask.

“I know,” he replied. “I mean, I'm sure you are. And I'm sure you wouldn't tell me if you weren't.”

Shiloh gave him a little smirk. “Probably not, no. So you're really gonna stay back here, huh?”

“I guess so,” Taylor replied with a shrug. “We'll see how long I make it.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess we will.”

The next seven hours passed by in a blur. If he hadn't checked his watch, Taylor wouldn't have even realized that much time had passed. He only left the room to get coffee and stale potato chips from a vending machine when his body began to protest the fact that he hadn't eaten all day. Otherwise, he remained right by Shiloh's side all the way. There were moments when he thought he might pass out – both from the sight in front of him and the strength with which she was squeezing his hand, but still he remained by her side. He hoped she would realize just what that meant when she looked back on that day later.

Finally, the doctor handed his baby girl to him. She was tiny and wrinkled and bright red, but she was his. Her hair was a shade of brown that wasn't really similar to either his or Shiloh's, but her eyes were bright blue-–the same blue that he knew people always commented on when they talked about his looks. 

“She's beautiful,” he said, no other more profound words coming to mind.

“Yeah, I guess we're lucky she doesn't look any more like you,” Shiloh replied, smirking.

Taylor rolled his eyes, but he couldn't wipe the smile off his face. “What are we going to call her?”

“Stella, like Zac wanted,” Shiloh said.

“Stella Mae,” Taylor cut in. “Charlotte's middle name.”

Shiloh smiled and nodded. “Stella Mae Hanson it is.”

Taylor didn't think he'd ever heard a more beautiful name.


	20. Epilogue -- Perfect

Taylor was multitasking and making a mess of it. He sat his coffee down, not caring that it was on top of a notebook-–better that than his piano-–and picked up his pencil to fix the last verse of the song he'd been working on. He wanted to get it absolutely perfect before going into the studio to record it.

He hadn't really thought, two years ago, that he would ever record anything again. But when they had packed up to move into their new house together, Shiloh had found the notebooks full of songs Taylor had written about Charlotte. After having a good cry about it, the two of them agree that a few of the songs were good enough to record. When Taylor really sat down and pored over them, he realized there was nearly an album worth of songs. A few went through lots of rewrites and he added in a couple more that were not so subtly about Zac, and after a few weeks, he had something he was rather proud of.

Taylor didn't know if anyone would buy a solo album by one of the two remaining Hanson boys, but it didn't matter. He was recording and producing it all by himself, for his own satisfaction, not for any sort of commercial success. 

That didn't mean that he didn't want it to be absolutely perfect, though. He'd been working on the last song, one about his feelings for Shiloh and Stella, for days and still it didn't feel right. The album wouldn't be complete without it, though.

Secluded in his makeshift studio, he didn't even hear the front door open. Had his piano bench not faced the door, he wouldn't have even realized that Shiloh and Stella were home. As it was, he had approximately two seconds to prepare himself for Stella's running attack. While Shiloh leaned against the door frame, looking exhausted, Stella wobbled across the room and launched herself at Taylor's legs. Chuckling, he pried her loose and hoisted her up into his lap.

“Did you have fun shopping with mommy?” He asked.

“Uh huh,” she replied. “We bought presents, but I'm not sposed to tell you what they are.”

Taylor chuckled, and glanced up at Shiloh. “You didn't need to do that.”

“Yeah, well, it's Christmas,” Shiloh replied, shrugging. 

Even after two years together, it took a lot to get any sort of emotional response out of her, at least where her relationship with him was concerned. Taylor didn't mind, though. He knew that they had survived the worst the world could possibly throw at them and they had only made it because they had each other. He'd still been a little nervous when he took her aside on Stella's second birthday and slipped a diamond ring onto her finger, but she had accepted it with an uncharacteristically sweet smile.

Without Charlotte and Zac, their lives weren't perfect. They couldn't be. But Taylor couldn't think of anything else that he would change.


End file.
